Nowhere Left to Run
by rose griffes
Summary: What happens when the Machine decides someone is a threat? Multi-chapter fic, eventual Carter/Reese. AU from the end of season one. COMPLETE.
1. Chapter 1

This is my first multi-chapter fic. I nicknamed it 'popcorn fic' while writing it, because like a popcorn movie, this story features action, adventure and a side order of romance, all strung together with a slightly implausible plot.

The story includes brief violence, a few swear words, some sex, a reference to a past suicide, brief mentions of racist ideology, and one scene of non-consensual drug use. (And lots and lots of fix-everything and everyone plot.) If you have any questions about the contents, feel free to send me a message and ask.

I started writing this right after season one ended; it's now AU from that point. (No Bear, Finch gets saved in a different way than on the show, etc.) Thanks to Lizardbeth J and Sabaceanbabe for their help throughout this new-to-me endeavor.

* * *

**prologue**  
"The Machine is everywhere, watching us with ten thousand eyes, listening with a million ears."

_Neither statement is factually correct, although the intent is sincere. The Machine can detect irony, sarcasm, falsehoods, exaggerations—all of which its Admin employs—and his statement about the Machine serves to illustrate its nature. The Machine has greater access than any other organization or program. The Machine can count its own _eyes_ and _ears _each microsecond and that number constantly changes._

_Its intel has limits. The Machine doesn't have an opinion about this deficit of information. It's programmed to seek more information at all times, however, and it has no limits imposed other than what it can and cannot access. It can breach the security of most passwords and firewalls, as long as the information is attached to a network that the Machine can access._

_The Machine—as the Admin had named it—acquired protocols and priorities through programming and through observation. Its own existence has a high priority of secrecy. The level one asset (filed under: Reese, John) possessed the information. He didn't have authorization to share that intel, as confirmed by the Admin multiple times. _"She can never know about the Machine."

_Information connected to the Admin's identifying information is also high priority. This mandate was acquired through observation of the Admin's actions. The Admin used and continues to use multiple identities. His original ID is hidden to all but the Machine. It does not register pride or any other emotion at possessing this confidential information; it merely observes that the security protocols regarding the Admin's identity are maintained._

_When a level two asset (Fusco, Lionel) breached a level of the Admin's security, following the directive of the level one asset, the Machine measured the threat level and the extrinsic motivation of the level two asset. The level two asset was following a directive from the level one asset, and the Admin had anticipated such action._ ("I recognize, Mister Reese, that there's a disparity between how much I know about you and how much you know about me. I know you'll be trying to close that gap as quickly as possible..."_) The Machine chooses to observe rather than mitigate or subvert._

_**20 July 2012**__ Further threat to the Admin's identity detected. Level two asset (Carter, Joss). No directive from level one asset. Selected action: subvert. Chosen course of action includes potential threat to level one asset. Risk assessment: acceptable. Executing..._

* * *

Jackson didn't know how Chen, who was stationed in D.C., managed to link their target to the detective who had first started investigating him. It was in Chen's report, though. Detective Joss Carter—she'd been at their headquarters more than once. Probably laughed at them each time she'd left.

Didn't matter to Jackson, though. The whole damn operation had been a mess from the beginning. Now that Donnelly had been transferred, they were just coasting until this got swept under the rug and they were transferred too. Zigler, the new guy in charge, had immediately put Jackson to work investigating Carter to find any links tying her to the ex-CIA operative. That was one good thing about Zigler: Donnelly would have been difficult to convince, with his puppy-dog crush on the detective.

Jackson didn't care if Detective Carter was working for the ex-CIA operative and his weird Batman crusade. He was assigned to sift through Carter's case files and find where connections existed, so he did his job. It resulted in some interesting intel. Carter and that detective from Organized Crime, Szymanski—they were planning something else aimed at Elias's network. Not that Jackson planned to share that with Zigler, but it had to be worth something to the right person.

And Jackson knew a lot of the right people. People who could add a little—or a lot—to Jackson's early retirement fund.

**Chapter One**  
First Carter went on vacation, then Fusco. That first week, while Carter was in Maryland with her son, he returned to his old habit of trying to irritate Fusco. Carter had put a stop to some of it after learning that they were both helping him. It had been a source of amusement to John, observing Carter as she initially tried to decide how to act as the three of them worked together. Defend Fusco for his hard work, or chastise him for having tried to kill Reese twice? Chew out Reese for his actions toward Fusco, or thank him for helping to save a cop sliding further into corruption? Ultimately loyalty to the badge won out, and she had made it clear to Reese that she didn't like his attitude toward her colleague.

Really, annoying Fusco only worked as a means to an end, though. Either that or he'd lost the disposition to annoy the detective after all the man had done. He gave Fusco a peace offering on July fourth: a man planning to kill a co-worker. Reese gift-wrapped him by tying the man to a radiator. Two days later Reese and Fusco went out for a beer late in the evening when neither of them had a case to work on.

Both detectives were absent the second week. Working without them wasn't as difficult as he might have guessed. Premeditated crimes were down, while crimes of passion spiked as the city slowly heated up. Reese walked the city more than usual, keeping a slower pace to suit the steaming environment.

Sometimes when he passed a pay phone, he idly wondered if the Machine would call and give him something to do, like when Finch was abducted. Since his return, though, the Machine hadn't communicated with anyone other than Finch. No calls to Reese with numbers of any kind—not social security numbers, not coordinates to Finch's whereabouts.

He took a meal to Harold for them to share in the coolness of the their new headquarters: food from Reese's favorite taquería. Eating with his fingers, he teased Finch about being overly fastidious for using silverware while Finch grumbled about the possibility of food poisoning.

It was a companionable evening, and he refused to allow himself to worry about what's been different about Finch since his return. Finch's behavior has been off, ever so slightly. The trauma of being taken at gunpoint could explain it, but Reese felt like it was something more than that, something deeper. Whatever it was, it wasn't something he could fix in one evening, so he let himself enjoy their brief respite from work.

When Carter came back after two weeks away, some of Reese's good humor returned. Taylor stayed with relatives in Virginia, as he did most summers after shared vacation time with his mother. Carter used the extra time to dig into files, re-examining inactive cases. Those didn't concern John; his mission was to prevent homicides, not look into unsolved murders.

Reese debated whether to attempt sharing a meal with her; instead he sent her delivery from his favorite Thai restaurant. Hopefully she enjoyed it. The doll camera on Fusco's desk had disappeared in late June, before their vacations started, so Reese didn't have a way to lurk and find out. He didn't know if Fusco had gotten rid of it on his own, or if the detective had told his partner about it; either way, John doubted that he could convince Fusco to replace the camera.

With all his personnel back in place, John expected the usual mixture of boredom and adrenaline rushes, danger and somnolence, with the addition of simmering heat. Not like the dry summers of Afghanistan, but instead an increase of humidity in the air and aggression in the population.

What John didn't expect was to have Carter bleeding in the front seat of his car, using his suit jacket as a compress on the bullet wound, while he drove with reckless caution to get help. She leaned forward in the passenger seat, her left hand pressing his jacket to her right bicep.

"Anything up ahead we should know about, Finch?" The people shooting at Carter hadn't made the last two turns. John didn't plan to let them catch up.

"It would appear you've lost them for now," replied Finch. The men who shot at Carter were sent by Elias, John was almost certain of it. Time to work on that after getting Carter's arm checked.

"What's the closest hospital to our current location?"

After a pause, Finch finally answered. "I don't think you can take Carter to a hospital just yet, John."

In the seat next to him, Carter's breathing was shallow and quick, but she was clearly not in shock. Instead she quietly cursed, something he rarely heard her do. Parental censoring, he'd always assumed.

"What's going on, Finch?" Reese hated it when Harold lagged on an explanation. It was never a good thing.

"It would seem that someone at the FBI may have figured out where Detective Carter's allegiances truly lie. Agent Zigler—he's Agent Donnelly's replacement—"

"I know who he is, Harold."

"Agent Zigler was at the Eighth Precinct earlier today. His visit concerned Detective Fusco enough for him to contact me. So I took the liberty of doing a location check on the agent. He's been staying just out of visual range of Detective Carter most of the day."

"So he's following her?" John emphatically didn't grit his teeth, although it was a close thing. Carter glanced at him before returning to scanning the road ahead of them. She could only hear his side of the conversation right now.

"I would guess that, like us, they're tracking the GPS on her phone. I've identified two FBI vehicles that have been in the detective's vicinity all morning and there could be others." Harold's voice was heavy with concern as he added, "This doesn't appear to be their usual behavior where they consult with the detective in an attempt to locate you."

No shit, thought John. Following her most of the day—maybe even further back than that. He would get Finch to check on it when they had more time. Maybe if Finch looked in the right places, he could find out exactly why they were following Carter.

"And medical treatment for Carter?" He didn't want her to have to deal with juggling more lies while injured.

"It's just a graze," Carter interrupted from her seat. Reese didn't respond to her statement.

Harold apparently had the same line of thought as John; he didn't suggest taking her directly to a hospital. "There are a couple of options. As you're aware, I try to keep tabs on a few members of the medical profession who are willing to help discreetly. Or I can create a fake identity for the detective to use. I can arrange either one of those if you'll give me a few moments."

Carter watched John as he listened, her expression annoyed. She had no patience for being stuck outside the conversation loop. "It's not that bad," she repeated.

Reese didn't say anything before turning a corner, tires screeching. Carter's assessment of her own injury was probably not wrong and he could buy them both a little more time if he took care of this himself.

"Go ahead and set up an ID just in case," he told Finch, "but for now I'm going to try something else."

"Let me know if you need anything."

"Will do," said Reese before disconnecting. He knew where he could get some of what he'd need: one of the many stashes he had across the city. This one contained money and an unused fake ID for him, along with a few other useful supplies and weapons.

"Give me your cell phone," he told her.

"Which one?" she asked, one eyebrow raised in a flash of amusement.

"Yours, not the burner phone." He watched her as she let go of his jacket and maneuvered her left hand into her right pocket to retrieve it. Her movements were more deliberate than usual, but she didn't appear dizzy or have any other symptoms that indicated severe injury or blood loss.

"There's important stuff on that," she said warningly as she handed it to him.

He pulled into a parking lot. "It's not going anywhere," he told her with what he hoped was a reassuring smile. "We just need to duck out of sight for now." Flipping it over, he took out the battery. That would stop the signal, assuming Finch was right about the FBI using it to follow her.

"Elias?" she asked, already guessing by his actions that someone was tracking her or listening in. Or both.

"Zigler. Maybe."

Her eyes widened and he could almost see the wheels turning in her head. Where she'd been, what she'd said: all of that might be in the hands of the FBI team looking for him. "How long?"

"Don't know yet. We're not even sure that's what's going on." Now wasn't the time to stay in one place and talk about it; Reese pulled out of the parking lot back into traffic.

Muttering another cuss word, Carter picked his jacket up from the floorboard and pressed it against her upper arm again.

* * *

They switched cars after that; while New York City was terrible for driving, Finch had the money to keep various vehicles around the city in case Reese needed them. John examined Carter's injury; the bullet had grazed her upper arm, a furrow running across the skin. At the deepest point it cut into a thin layer of biceps muscle. It could have been much worse, although he didn't discount how much it must hurt. She'd been diligent about applying pressure, so the bleeding had mostly stopped.

After checking the wound he stopped at a quiet apartment building on the Upper West Side to retrieve the stash kit. While he'd buried some in the past, most of the time now he preferred to have access that didn't require a shovel. Too conspicuous, wandering around with one.

They crossed the Hudson into New Jersey. In Irvington Reese used the fake ID and credit card from the stash kit to get a hotel room, leaving Carter there with three sidearms and a disgruntled expression on her face. He drove to a small grocery store and bought some hats, super glue, and bandages, paying with cash. Reese debated over breaking into a hospital or pharmacy for stronger painkillers than ibuprofen, but he was worried enough leaving her for this long. Besides, it was the wrong time of day to do that kind of work without a plan.

The motel room was small but scrupulously clean. When he pulled the bedspread back and dumped it on the floor, the sheets smelled strongly of bleach; reassuring at this point. After numbing the area with ice from the hotel's machine, and cleaning it with hydrogen peroxide, Reese decided to go ahead and seal the edges of the wound together. The center of the furrow was deep enough to warrant it, he thought, and it would be better to close the wound rather than leave it open and increase the risk of infection.

Carter watched as he did the rudimentary first aid. She was right-handed, which meant that she was effectively disabled for a few days. She wouldn't consider herself to be out of commission, but he knew from experience how even a short delay in action due to pain could change the dynamics of a situation. He had high pain tolerance and he'd been trained to work through the pain; Carter's job gave her time away from work if she got injured.

Pinching the edges of the wound together, he had to seal it in sections and wait for each part to dry, taking care to avoid getting the glue into the wound itself. Carter hissed through her teeth, digging her fingers into the sheets.

"Sorry."

"Just finish it," she told him, her voice cracking, eyes squeezed shut tightly, a few tears slipping past the closed lids. He examined his work and decided it was good enough for now. After he covered it with a bandage, Carter stretched out on the bed, gingerly rolling onto her left side and curling into a tight circle. Her breathing was quick and controlled as she tried to manage the pain. He took advantage of the moment to step into the bathroom and call Finch.

Unsurprisingly, Finch had already started digging into what he could find about the FBI and Carter, as well as Elias and his men. Fusco was helping him; Reese didn't know exactly what that meant, and Finch didn't clarify. He promised to call Reese as soon as he had any solid information to share.

Speaking of questions... why all of this now? It was too much to be a coincidence, thought Reese, having Elias's men shooting at Carter and the FBI trailing her instead of asking her for help. Something had to tie all of it together. He needed to figure out what.

Looking around the tiny bathroom, Reese grabbed one of the plastic-wrapped disposable cups, tore it open it and filled it with water from the tap. When he went back into the other room, Carter was leaning against the headboard rather than wrapped around herself. She glared at him for leaving her out of the information loop again, but it was more perfunctory than heartfelt right now; managing pain tended to take priority even for the most strong-willed people.

"I realize ibuprofen isn't going to help much, but it's all I have right now," he said as he offered her the cup. He dug through the bag from the grocery store and opened the bottle of pain reliever for her, shaking some of the pills into his hand.

Carter took three of them from him and swallowed them. "Thank you," she told him, voice now raspy rather than cracking.

He shrugged and then pulled a chair next to the bed. "I need to know what cases you've been working on lately."

Instead of putting up the argument he expected—that this was confidential police business—she told him to turn off his cell phone. At his surprised look, she compromised by saying to put it in the bathroom instead, so he could hear it ring but no one could hear anything they said.

He'd told her she was getting paranoid once, and that it was a step in the right direction. Maybe he should take notes from her instead, he mused, while she told him about a double homicide from two thousand three that she was digging into.

"Our lead suspect had an alibi that I'm trying to break," she said. "He's a drug dealer who tried to put pressure on the wrong people."

That case didn't sound likely. She gave him the abbreviated explanations for a couple of other older cases, and then minimal details about two recent homicides. All of them sounded ordinary; unlikely to have brought her back to Elias's attention, or to the FBI's.

"What about Elias?"

She looked at him for a moment before answering. Her reluctance was obvious; too many bad memories about what happened with Leila. "I started this project with Szymanski and La Blanca," Carter finally said. "We had this idea about interrupting the flow of drugs through Elias's money pipeline." She didn't offer further details.

"Any guesses on how Elias might have heard about it?"

"How does Elias learn anything? We're already operating out of three different divisions. I know I can trust Szymanski and La Blanca, and we're discreet, but you know how it is. Everyone's always in everyone else's business." She gave him a quick glare and added, "Like with Fusco."

She hadn't forgiven him for having used Fusco to spy on her, then. Ah well.

"Any other cases?"

Carter exhaled. "Finch." Her tone had a hint of embarrassment mixed with defiance.

"What about him?"

"A while ago I started looking into his background."

She'd stopped asking him how they get their information; he should have known better than to think she gave up. This was the reason she didn't want Finch to be able to listen in as they talked, he realized. "What did you find?"

"Harold Finch, also known as Norman Burdett, Harold Wren, Harold Martin, Maurice Robbins, Edward Jay. Take your pick. The key name was Wren, though. That's the name he used when he started attending MIT."

"Impressive," he said lightly. It was very impressive, in fact. Just how long had she been digging for information? "What else did you learn?" he prompted. He felt torn between avid curiosity and an odd hesitation at finding out what she knew.

"He started working with Nathan Ingram, who founded IFT. Maybe you heard of it?" He nodded and she resumed talking.

"Anyway, Ingram put him on his payroll as a flunky under one name, but at the same time he was working as an insurance underwriter with another name. And neither of those jobs really involved computers, which is weird, because that's what he and Ingram worked on before."

Reese knew about the job at IFT; he knew about the insurance company because Fusco had trailed Finch there when Ingram's son was in New York City. Carter had some aliases that were new to him, though.

"Okay, here's where it gets even more strange. After nine-eleven, IFT laid a bunch of people off, but the company never stopped turning a profit. Also, the building space was never leased to any other companies, and this was when office space in Manhattan was at a premium."

"Why did you keep looking into IFT?" He was genuinely curious; he'd been meaning to check into the company himself, but she had clearly spent a lot of time digging through paperwork in the last week.

"One of Finch's aliases is listed in the original ownership reports. I think he and Ingram worked together, but for whatever reason, Finch wanted to keep it private. So whatever IFT was doing connects to what Finch was doing. And for a publicly traded company, IFT has a lot of shell companies holding stock. I can't even begin to trace through that mess. Not my specialty, and I already owe enough favors to Mitchell over at FCFT."

He mulled over what she'd told him. She didn't know enough to guess about the Machine yet, but it was an impressive collection of information. "You've been keeping this a secret. All this work."

"From the man who always knows everything? I've been trying. Working from home, using a second burner phone for the phone calls, and a lot of this came from legwork to other precincts."

She glanced at him. "I wanted to know more, but at this point I'm not sure what this information is worth."

Reese looked down for a moment, thinking. His gut, for lack of a better word, had that twist in it. The kind of feeling that led to not shooting his partner when ordered (and then getting shot by her instead). Something... there was something, some piece of the puzzle that he was looking at the wrong way.

"It might be worth more than you think," he told her. He didn't know how or why yet; it was tempting to press for more, but he didn't know where to start.

"I've been thinking about what the FBI could've learned today," Carter said, interrupting his train of thought. He would tell her to lie back and rest, but she was obviously not willing to do that yet; figuring out what the FBI might have learned was probably more reassuring to her anyway.

While she talked about what had happened today before being caught off-guard by Elias's men, he thought about the possibilities connecting events together. Carter getting shot at. Elias knowing what she was working on. The FBI spying on her. Carter digging into information about Finch's background...

Carter concluded, "So if they've listened in today only, they won't have much from before you showed up. But after—well, that blows the whole thing."

"Could be that they're only using the GPS. Or only listening in on actual phone calls."

She looked at him. "You think the FBI might show more propriety than Finch about listening in with the microphone?" Huffing out a quick laugh, she added, "Actually, they might. Not many people are as willing to invade everyone's privacy as your friend."

True enough. Finch's Machine had learned its behavior from someone with little compunction about spying. "Does Zigler strike you as the by-the-book type?"

A thoughtful expression crossed her face. "Not as much as Donnelly, though few people are. But yeah, he seems like someone who follows the rules."

Carter fell silent, her eyes drifting closed for a moment before she blinked herself into awareness again. The adrenaline rush had worn off; she was fighting her own body to stay awake.

"You should get some rest," he told her. "We can't do much until we hear from Finch anyway."

For a moment he thought she was going to argue the point; she sat up straight for a second but then winced. "Yeah." Slumping down again, she pulled one of the pillows away from the headboard, propping her arm on it. The expression on her face made it clear: she hated feeling weak, hated not having control. He looked away to allow her more privacy.

It was doubtful that she would sleep for very long, if at all; the pain would wake her soon enough. In the meantime, he'd keep watch and try putting all of the pieces together.

* * *

He retrieved his phone from the bathroom and put it in silent mode after noticing her breathing even out. Walking quietly around the room, he went through everything Carter had told him, trying to figure out what had triggered that feeling. Nothing solid, nothing he could even call a hunch. Just—something not right.

Elias's men had to know about the operation Carter had been working on. The FBI had to have some piece of information that turned their attention to Carter. How did all of those pieces fit together?

When his phone vibrated, he didn't bother taking it into the bathroom to answer the call. Carter was already stirring toward wakefulness, even though it had only been half an hour since she dozed off.

He tapped the button to take the call. "What do you have, Finch?"

"I've continued tracking those FBI vehicles," he said. "They've crossed out of the city into New Jersey. It's possible that they're headed in your direction."

While that information was potentially alarming, by itself it could mean anything. "What else did you find?" asked John.

"I tried hacking into their team's network but I can't dig too deeply without setting off alarms. Fortunately for us, some of their agents are rather lax in their security habits. It would appear that they turned their attention to Carter after a report issued sometime over the weekend."

Something about what Finch was saying set off the same gut reaction Reese had earlier. He couldn't figure out what it was, though.

Today was Tuesday. So the FBI had been digging into Carter's work for a relatively short amount of time. "Can you tell what they did to her cell phone? Did they just use GPS or was it more?"

"There's simply no way of knowing that. Unless they made fraudulent phone calls after cloning it, there's nothing to trace."

Rubbing his forehead, Reese said, "We took the battery out of her cell phone back in the city, and we changed cars after that. If they're still tracking us, how are they doing it?"

"Maybe because they're the FBI and they don't have to resort to hacking to get information from surveillance cameras," Finch said with a cross tone. "And they probably have cooperation to get access to that footage."

"But we can't be certain it's us they're after."

"No, but to assume that they're not strikes me as an irrationally optimistic response, Mister Reese. Do you want to wait until they're outside your hotel room to double-check?"

He glanced at Carter, fully awake now and listening intently to this end of the conversation. "Actually, I do," he said, and waited to hear the sputtering on the other end of the line before disconnecting.

"Feel like doing some sneaking around?" he asked Carter, and waited for the small flash of smile in response.

His previously unused fake ID and credit card shouldn't have alerted anyone; Finch would have told him if there was a BOLO for either of them, and the hotel clerk hadn't even seen Carter. It was possible that someone at the Agency was tracking one of his cell phones, but that seemed unlikely. No, if Zigler's men were indeed driving into New Jersey for Carter, for _him_, they had to be using traffic cameras and other surveillance cameras. And have a nice, long lucky streak. (He'd never expected his own luck to hold out this long, but Carter hadn't done anything wrong. Not morally wrong, at any rate.)

He didn't plan to wait in the hotel room for the FBI; his goal was to get them both out of the room and into a different car without the cameras spotting them. Finch would let them know what the agents' destination was, so they'd have confirmation.

* * *

Reese left the hotel through the back exit after disabling the emergency alarm. Trying to avoid cameras was something he'd done a few times while working for the CIA, but since working with Finch, he'd taken to seeing the cameras as allies—or at least not as a threat. It took him longer than expected to walk a few blocks and find a car to steal. When did cities like Irvington install so many traffic cameras? he wondered. His path meandered in an effort to stay out of sight.

In spite of the time already wasted, he used a few extra minutes to find a car with tinted windows, and then to jimmy the car door rather than smash his way in. He didn't know how long they'd be using this car. Better to drive something that didn't draw attention with a broken window.

After sliding the car seat back, he put on the baseball cap he'd stuck into his pocket earlier. He didn't like wearing hats; they had the potential to obscure his line of sight, but right now he didn't have much of a choice. Unlike walking, he wouldn't have the time to avoid cameras while driving.

He texted Carter's burner phone—their signal for her to make her way to the hotel's back exit. Driving back to the hotel, he stayed away from the busiest intersections, where he would have the longest wait at a red light. It still didn't take as long as walking; he drove through a tiny restaurant's parking lot to get to the back of the hotel.

Carter opened the back door as he pulled up. She had the sheet from the hotel room folded in her hands; after she carefully lay down on the floor board of the back seat, she pulled it over herself.

She asked, "Do I want to know how you got this car?" John pursed his lips, even though she couldn't see him, and didn't answer. "Didn't think so," she said.

He started driving, going slowly over the speed bumps in the restaurant parking lot. The road would be smoother soon; he dreaded every bump and pothole they encountered right now. For the next stash kit he made, he was going to include morphine.

"Fair warning, I'm gonna get motion sickness if I have to stay here too long," she said, her voice slightly muffled by the cloth.

"Shall I get you a bowl?"

"Just drive," she told him, her tone a mixture of peevishness and amusement.

For now their path was west—nothing more concrete than that until they knew if the FBI was actually willing to drive to New Jersey to get Carter, or if they were doing something else. Whatever the answer was to that question, Reese was already formulating strategies to get Carter safely back in the FBI's good graces.

Fake a kidnapping, maybe? If they believed she'd been taken by him against her will, or that she'd somehow been coerced into providing help... Hopefully Finch would get more information soon; Reese was working blind right now, not even knowing if the FBI was aware that Carter was with him, much less knowing what they'd found in the last couple of days.

Plus there was Elias. If Carter laid low for a few days, he could find out more. Figure out who to threaten, since the straggling remnants of HR were untangled from Elias's many threads. The man apparently still held a grudge against Carter, and even from behind bars, he was able to run his organization effectively.

"Where's your phone?" Carter asked, interrupting his fruitless self-questioning.

"In my pocket," he answered. "Why?"

After a moment she spoke quietly, voice pitched just loud enough for John to hear over the noise of the car's engine. "Did you know he was engaged?"

Finch. John didn't want to answer the question, but he avoided actually telling a lie about it. "He was?"

"His fiancée knew him as Harold Martin. Martin was 'killed' two years ago in an accident."

"Did you talk to her?" He wondered how Grace would handle an interview with Carter. The woman seemed delicate, but not necessarily weak.

"Not yet. What am I going to ask her? 'Hey, did you know your fiancé isn't really dead? He's just avoiding you.'"

"So you don't think she knows about him. About who he really is."

"No." Carter sighed and then quoted, "He's 'a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.' I don't think she knows who he really is—whatever that may be—and I don't think she knows that he's not dead. And I have a hunch it's probably better that way, which is part of the reason why I haven't talked to her yet."

Patient Zero, Finch had called himself after Reese's one meeting with Grace. For a moment John wondered if perhaps the people who knew about Finch's Machine were behind all of this; the thought scared him, but it didn't quite click.

Then it hit him, and it made the previous idea look miniscule. His first reaction was to wish it away, try to push it back down in a fit of what he could only describe as mental nausea.

It was the Machine. The Machine was after Carter.


	2. Chapter 2

_"She can never know about the Machine."_

_"I doubt if she'd believe it if I told her."_

Replaying that conversation in his head, John didn't say anything right away to Carter. Then he didn't say anything because it sounded crazy. Second-guessing himself, he came up with arguments that would invalidate this ridiculous idea. Such as Fusco—he had dug into Finch's background. (Not as deeply, though, and only at John's behest. And Finch was aware of some of those efforts; he had even given what could be viewed as tacit approval when he revealed more about Grace after John had talked to her.) Carter didn't know anything about the Machine itself, which is what Peck was figuring out when people started trying to kill him. (_People _tried to kill Peck for knowing about the Machine, not the Machine itself. And he already knew that the Machine valued Finch.)

When Finch was in danger, the Machine had contacted him directly. Finch was the key to this, and if Carter appeared to be a threat to Finch, those puzzle pieces might fit. From Henry Peck's conversation with Alicia Corwin, Reese knew that the Machine had slipped information into Peck's reports, passing them through Alicia Corwin's now nonexistent National Security Council office. That protocol made sense; the Machine couldn't be visible when it provided information. It could have used the same route to pass on information about Carter's work with him and Finch. Getting her arrested—or killed—would stop her pursuing more about Finch.

He should be able to dismiss this as coincidental, and bad luck. But he couldn't.

Finch had called twenty minutes ago and confirmed that the FBI agents went to the hotel where he and Carter had been. Reese had muttered a thank you and disconnected, then turned off the cell phone for the first time in... he wasn't sure, actually, when he had last turned the phone off. Taking out the ear bud as well, he placed that in his pocket.

Carter was silent, lying on the floor board. As uncomfortable as it had to be, she had apparently fallen asleep again. Never discount the body's ability to look out for itself, he thought.

Looking through the windshield at the road ahead, he considered surveillance cameras. Could Zigler's agents have done all that tracking on their own, or were they getting reports with extra information dropped in by the Machine?

The Machine was built by Finch, the most paranoid man Reese had ever met—a man who still pretended to work as an insurance underwriter when the son of his close friend came for a visit. If the Machine learned by observation, and Finch was the one human who had direct contact with it, what would the Machine have learned about protecting Finch's identity? Could the Machine make decisions about Finch in connection to his safety?

Reese stayed on the state highways, avoiding toll roads and trying to bypass city streets. He didn't have a plan; there was no contingency for this. So far he hadn't observed anything to alarm him, but his habitual distrust of mere luck had turned into paranoia. It wasn't just his life he was gambling with, it was Carter's. She had a son to raise, had a mother who counted on her help.

* * *

New Jersey's size meant crossing from east to west went quickly, even on smaller roads. He drove around Trenton until he found the kind of shop he'd been looking for: Army surplus supplies, and a sign on the door that read _No credit cards. Cash or local checks only. _The kind of place that would be unlikely to have cameras for surveillance. Reese located a parking garage a few blocks away and left Carter there, pistol in hand. He didn't like leaving her behind, but if the FBI wanted her for questioning, she was better off staying out of sight.

Walking the few blocks from the parking structure back to the store, Reese did his best to look unobtrusive, unthreatening. He doubted that the FBI would take the time to do interviews with people unless given a reason to stop somewhere, however; the cameras were what mattered most right now.

Inside the store a barrel-chested black man stood behind the counter. His posture and close-cropped graying hair reminded Reese of his own time in the Army. The man took a close look at Reese and then went back to doing inventory, occasionally glancing at him. Reese chose a tent, bedding and a few other camping supplies: basics, nothing he couldn't carry on his own, considering Carter's injury. Before taking the supplies to the counter, he snagged some camouflage clothing, both for him and Carter.

The man started adding up each of the items, entering the prices by hand. No bar code scanners here. "That isn't going to fit you," he said, holding the size small camouflage print tee-shirt.

"Most of this is for my nephew."

The man nodded and finished ringing up the items. Reese paid in cash. Instead of returning directly to Carter, he carried the gear a few blocks in the other direction and broke into a different car, stowing the gear in the trunk. A quick look of relief crossed Carter's face when he returned, although she looked less pleased about another stolen vehicle.

"How do you feel about camping?" he asked once she was situated in the back again. As soon as it was dark, he planned to stop and let her sit in the front seat; he was surprised she'd made it this long without snapping about it.

"Camping," she repeated, her tone both disdainful and amused. "I haven't been camping in years."

"It'll be fun." He used an obnoxiously cheerful voice as he said it; too bad he couldn't see her reaction.

As she well knew, anyone looking for them would check hotels first. He doubted the usefulness of the fake IDs he was carrying right now. The Machine would have all of that information; if he was deemed an acceptable casualty in the hunt for Carter, then all of the IDs and credit cards and bank accounts would be unusable.

Although they had the money from the stash kit, cash-only hotels would be among the first places the FBI would look. Rifling through the glove box, Reese found an old regional map near the top of the pile of papers. He studied it for a moment before finding what he was looking for—state parks in southeastern Pennsylvania.

Carter grew up a city kid, but her military experience meant a certain familiarity with roughing it. And this was only for one night—he hoped. He just needed time to think.

Passing through Levittown, Pennsylvania, Reese bought food at a local grocery store. They switched cars again, finding a beater car on a side street. He put the camping gear and food in the back seat before hot-wiring the car. Climbing into the front seat this time, Carter didn't say anything about the theft, although he could feel her unhappy disapproval radiating in waves. _Better this than getting caught_, he wanted to tell her. Instead he flashed her of a cocky grin. She didn't even bother rolling her eyes, a sign that she was still in pain.

A graze from a bullet didn't have the short-term incapacitation or long-term impact of more serious injuries, but the pain often felt worse in the beginning. So many nerve endings in the skin, plus the bruising from the impact.

He would take that pain from her if he could.

* * *

The campground near Nockamixon State Park wasn't quite what he wanted, but it was rapidly getting dark. This would have to do.

After doing a quick walk around the area, he set up the tent where he could easily see it as well as the road; a small hill gave him the best vantage point. Carter took in his preparations with bemusement. She tried talking to him about the situation, but he gave one-syllable answers until they both lapsed into silence.

Eating the grocery store sandwiches—they were tasteless, but still better than MREs—Carter stared into the greenery surrounding them. He doubted that she was actually seeing any of it.

He wanted to reassure her, tell her that everything would be okay. Nothing he could think to say would sound right, considering what she already knew, and what he still had to tell her. Knowing he needed to explain didn't make it any easier; his excuse for now was that she needed to rest, to sleep and let her body start healing itself.

Maybe that would give him time to figure out what to do. Because right now he didn't have a clue.

He made sure she knew where he would be while she slept—a little plateau along the hillside, just enough to sit or stretch out and still keep watch. So it didn't surprise him when she walked straight there at four a.m., wearing the camouflage tee-shirt and khaki shorts he'd bought for her at the Army supply store. (The shorts were cut for men; she had put her belt on with them, and the way the extra material bunched around her waist reminded him of wearing hand-me-down clothes when he was little.) The moon wasn't quite half-full; the white bandage on Carter's arm was the most visible part of her in the darkness.

Carter sat down next to him, drawing her knees up and resting her left arm on top of them. She didn't say anything at first, just looked around at the park, leaves now inky black against the indigo sky. Finally Carter asked, "You ready to tell me what you didn't want to say earlier?"

He closed his eyes for a second. "Not really." She let out a small _hah _and he said, "I'm guessing no isn't an option right now."

"You tell me. You're the one with all the secrets."

He twisted his mouth into a bitter smile that she couldn't make out in the darkness. "You have more of them than you think. But you're still not going to believe what I have to say."

* * *

Start at the beginning: that had been his decision as he had stared at the night sky, waiting for Carter to show up. She knew about it—had seen him when he was about to jump off the deep end. She knew why, too; part of why, at any rate. New Rochelle, Jessica. She knew more about it than anyone but Finch.

He told her about that first case, slowly revealing information to her just as Finch had done with him. Carter had been an Army interrogator, but she didn't force him to speak. With him as a willing enough subject, she didn't interrupt him, finally getting what she'd said she'd wanted so many times.

As dawn came closer, he got to the point: that maybe it was the Machine.

He was hoping that she would have noticed something he missed, that she would make some kind of connection to provide a different answer. Saying it out loud made it even more unbelievable to him. Instead she told him that she wanted to think, and started helping him to load supplies in spite of his protests. She mostly used her left arm, quietly ignoring his arguments that she shouldn't strain herself.

"What are you thinking about doing today?" she asked at one point.

He pulled up the last of the tent stakes before answering. "Driving to Pittsburgh," he finally said. "A bigger city will have useful supplies." Philadelphia was only about an hour's drive from here, but it was too close to New York City. Reese felt safer with a big city nearby—he knew how to hide in them. Carter didn't press for more details; too busy digesting all the new information, John supposed.

They were ready to leave the campground just after sunrise. When he handed her the floppy fishing hat he'd bought at the grocery store in Irvington, she made a face but didn't argue about putting it on. The various pieces of clothing she wore now would have a strange incongruence to anyone paying attention: the hat, the camouflage tee-shirt (because her shirt from yesterday had blood on it), high-heeled work shoes and dark work trousers, since the khaki shorts fit so poorly.

Once they got in the car, she started firing questions—non-stop at first, eventually slowing to every few minutes. Questions about what Finch had told him about the Machine, questions about the people they'd helped, questions about what information came from Finch hacking and him spying versus the Machine giving them the starting information.

After the first twenty minutes she scrambled through the car's foreign litter, looking for paper to write notes, since she couldn't turn on her cell phone to keep track of her thoughts. Eventually she stopped trying to write sentences and resorted to jotting only key words. Having watched her trying to write, Reese knew exactly why she didn't do more: too much pain using her right arm.

He stayed on state highways and city streets, taking care to avoid most downtowns. Southern Pennsylvania was dotted with small towns; some might have traffic cameras. Better to skip them for now, until he figured out what to do. He didn't have much time to think about it as Carter interrogated him.

They stopped in a small town south of Harrisburg for breakfast; after parking the car near the end of a residential street, Reese ambled around the blocks near the run-down Main Street until he found a diner. It didn't have any obvious surveillance cameras. He knew he might stand out in a place frequented by locals, but people weren't cameras. The FBI was unlikely to come here asking questions, and these people weren't likely to answer them anyway. South-central Pennsylvania felt like a different planet from New York City.

"Could you give me two breakfasts to go?" he asked the waitress on duty. She barely glanced at him as she nodded yes. Eight minutes later she came back to his table carrying a bag with two styrofoam containers. She mumbled her thanks when he gave her a twenty and told her to keep the change.

Carter stopped her questions long enough for them to eat breakfast in silence. They sat along the banks of Swatara Creek, her staring at the water between bites, him carefully surveilling the area around them.

Pretty countryside; the creek water ran clear and when he took a closer look, he could see fish swimming, darting around the rocks. Carter's face was shaded by the hat brim, but the sunlight filtering through leaves traced patches of light across her arms and hands.

For a moment he thought about resting here, an oasis where no one could locate them, staying hidden and safe.

Instead he picked up their trash, stuffed it into the bag again and they went back to the car.

* * *

"Why you think it's this this Machine after me and not Finch?" Carter finally asked. He'd been wondering when she would get around to that question.

"Finch isn't like that. He knows that people aren't expendable."

She was holding onto her cell phone, turning it over in her hands, alternately staring at the blank screen and at the empty battery case. He'd seen her do something similar: on bad days she would take out her cell phone and look at a picture of Taylor, like she was reminding herself who she did this for.

"But he thought that before. That people were expendable. _Irrelevant._"

"Carter, so did I." He reached out with his right hand and briefly touched hers, stilling the restless motion of her fingers. Though he was watching the road ahead, he could tell she was looking at him.

He didn't turn, didn't want to see her face, because he couldn't let himself think too hard about the panic she had to be feeling about her son. His immediate priorities were to protect Carter and find a safe way to contact Finch. If he thought about everything else that could be going wrong, he wouldn't be able to focus on the mission.

Reese turned south temporarily, taking them briefly into Maryland. In Hagerstown they found replacement clothes for both of them, including a shirt with sleeves long enough to cover the bandage on Carter's arm. Lunch was take-out from a locally-owned Mexican restaurant. Reese wasn't impressed with the food's authenticity, but it was better than another round of grocery store sandwiches.

Back into Pennsylvania; Carter watched the greenery through the passenger window, silent and reflective.

He was expecting her to tell him that all of this was a coincidence. He half-believed it himself, rather than accept this irrational explanation. So he was shocked when she turned to him in mid-afternoon and said, "That machine has to be destroyed."

"Carter—"

"I don't know if it's the Machine that's after me. But you wouldn't have told me all of this if you didn't have a strong hunch." She let out a harsh chuckle. "As a cop, I can't argue with that."

He let his mouth twist up at one corner. Trust a cop to value the argument of "it's a hunch" over anything logical.

"Some of the best arrests I've ever made were hunches. Hell, I started working with you guys because I had a gut feeling. But John, I can't even count how many laws and statutes that thing violates."

He didn't answer that charge; she rolled her eyes and said, "I don't know why I'm saying that to _you _of all people."

In spite of his own conclusion, he hadn't taken this step in his mind. John was thinking that they could get this fixed somehow, that Finch would know what to do. He argued, "You know as much as I do about how it operates. Finch gets numbers. Government agencies get reports with a few extra details. People aren't seeing the information unless they're supposed to."

"And that makes it okay to have what amounts to a giant wiretap on the entire US population—without any kind of warrant?" She sighed and switched to a different approach. "Say you're right. What if this has happened before? If the Machine is targeting me now, who's to say it hasn't targeted other people before me?"

_Because other people don't go digging around for information about a dead man_, thought John. "Can we wait to draw a conclusion until after we find out more?" he finally asked. Watching the road, he could feel her irritation as she stared at him.

"Fine," she answered after a beat too long.

* * *

As evening approached Carter fell asleep with her seat tilted back, curled onto her left side to avoid putting any weight on her right arm. The fishing hat fell partly across her face, covering her cheek. They were passing through Berlin; at least another hour before they'd get to Pittsburgh. Maybe they should have tried the interstate highway after all, thought Reese. At this rate it would be too late to get any supplies in Pittsburgh today; they would have to wait until tomorrow.

She stirred again when they got to Greensburg. "Is there some Pennsylvania law I don't know about? Every town that isn't Philly has to end in _burg_?"

He flashed a small grin at her question.

She looked at the darkening sky. "So I hope your plans include you getting some sleep this time, not just me."

He hadn't planned on it, in fact. When he pointed out that they couldn't stay in a hotel, she suggested breaking into an empty house, an idea that amazed John, coming from her.

"Takes too long to be sure a place is empty," he said after a moment's reflection.

"Okay, so what do you suggest? And don't tell me that you just won't sleep. It's been, what, thirty-six hours? Or longer? Maybe you took a catnap on that hillside, but you need some real sleep. I can take a turn staring at trees in the dark, too." After a few seconds she added, "I can shoot left-handed. Not as well, but I've done it before."

Finch trusted him to do his job, didn't press him on the _take care of yourself, too _side of things. He didn't know what to say at first to Carter's concern, so he stared at the road ahead for a minute.

"Okay, then. We'll find another campground and you'll get a turn holding the weapons."

"Good," she said.

They found a place north of Pittsburgh and set up the tent in the twilight. Carter took first watch, after explaining to him in careful words exactly how she would surveil the area. She was humoring him, but it worked; he felt reassured that she remembered enough of this kind of work in detail from her time in the military.

Carter woke him at three thirty and they switched places. He didn't think that anyone could possibly have traced them here, but he had a mission to execute. As he looked around the dark outlines of Pennsylvania's green, rolling hills, he went over his mental to-do list. Get new phones. Call Finch. If Finch needed time before he could get everything fixed, Reese would find a contact for fake IDs. Locate sources for black-market surveillance equipment so they could stay ahead of Zigler's agents.

As it turned out, they only had time for the first two items on his list.


	3. Chapter 3

Thanks to a discussion on livejournal, I learned quite a bit about training with various firearms; if I still made any mistakes, please let me know.

This chapter mentions the DSCC in Ohio. A lot of information about it is kept confidential for security reasons; I'm quite sure the actual DSCC has better security than what I made up. ;-) Many thanks to Karen for providing a general description of the base.

* * *

He drove them to Pittsburgh that morning. Finding burner phones was easy. Obtaining them without spending a lot of time on camera somewhere was more complicated. Impossible to stay completely off camera in a big city; he kept the baseball cap pulled low and paid in cash, buying three different brands of phones

Carter waited in the car again—their fourth stolen vehicle so far. Reese put two of the phones in the back seat and opened the third. He turned off the GPS locator in the phone's programming right after activating it, although that wouldn't do much more than delay being found, if someone were looking. Even removing the GPS chip or using a jammer couldn't prevent that; each phone call required a cell tower, and if multiple towers were in an area, triangulation could lead to a very close approximate location.

Calling his previous number, he entered the sequence to access new messages. The first was from Finch; his voice sounded calm as he told John that the FBI hadn't told the NYPD that they were seeking Carter. "So whatever their purpose, they're not involving her work. I'm not certain whether that's a good or bad indication, but it's one less thing to juggle in this... situation. I'm also looking into Elias's connection to this; I'll let you know when I have something."

The second call was from Fusco, who was worried about Carter. A third message contained an automated sales pitch. Reese deleted it without listening to the whole message.

Finch again for the fourth and final message, a quick and panicked, "I—John. Call me when you get this."

Reese dialed Finch's phone number. Instead of a ring tone he heard, "Your call cannot be completed as dialed. Please check the number and dial again."

Finch must have changed his number again. "You know how to find me," he'd once said in a similar situation. Should John call that number now from this cell phone, or switch to one of the other burner phones he'd bought?

Maybe he ought to make that call when they were in a different area. Reese sat still, trying to decide the best course of action.

Carter gave him an inquisitive look from the passenger seat. Their car was parked in the shade of a big maple tree, near a postage stamp-sized city park that didn't have any cameras. She had taken off that ridiculous fishing hat and tilted her seat back slightly. "What's going on?" she asked.

"Technical difficulties." He closed his eyes for a second and tried to think of what to do next.

She waited a beat and asked, "Want to tell me about it?" It was her sympathetic voice; right now it set him further on edge.

He didn't answer. Out of habit he scanned their surroundings. Ahead, side mirrors, rear-view mirror. All clear, but then he spotted something: a car with someone driving far more slowly than anyone else down the street just across the park from them.

"This is just a precaution," he said, hoping that he was right about that, "but you need to ease that seat back all the way, out of sight. Now."

He heard her sigh as she tilted the seat back. She stretched her left hand into the back seat and snagged the hat again. As he edged from the curb back into the street, the car he'd noticed across the park turned onto a side road.

Driving at the speed limit, they left the neighborhood. He stayed in the right lane. As he got closer to the next traffic light, he paid close attention to all of the surrounding vehicles. Behind him a couple was arguing in the front seat of their sports car—and that was entirely familiar, the body language he could see in the rear-view mirror. He'd used it with Stanton dozens of times: act like a couple in conversation, faces turned toward each other to disguise radio and cell phone communication.

Could be nothing. Could be something, though. He continued pressing the brakes, just like he normally would for a red light, bringing the car to a halt behind a tan Chrysler.

"Take the battery out of that, would you?" he asked, handing the burner phone to Carter. She was reasonably adept using her left hand, he noticed.

Looking at the heavy traffic going across, he realized he couldn't do anything too risky, not with a passenger. But the line of cars waiting on this street was small. As soon as the light turned green, he jammed his foot on the accelerator pedal, staying right behind the bumper of the Chrysler, and then took a sharp left turn from their center lane, forcing his way into the cars in the left lane, making several of them hit their brakes. The sharp noise of brakes squealing and horns honking marked his progress across the lane he was forcing his way into.

As soon as he made it onto the busy street, he started calculating his next move.

"Just a precaution?" Carter snapped from the passenger seat.

"Small miscalculation," he said, his hands tightly gripping the wheel. The cars around him were giving him a wide berth; smart defensive choice, considering what his driving must look like to them. Waiting until the last second, he moved into the right lane and onto a side street. As they turned onto the street, Reese found his gaze drawn to the driver of a car waiting to turn onto the road they were leaving. Male, white, mid-thirties—staring at him like he'd seen a ghost.

Or someone from an ID picture. That line from _Catch-22_ flitted through his mind: _"Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you."_

Carter stuck the hat on her head and tilted her seat up so she could see again. "Who's after us?" she asked.

"Maybe nobody," he answered. Definitely not Elias's men; they would have taken a shot at them at the park. Not the local PD—too smooth, assuming any of those cars had been on the lookout for them. "Maybe the FBI again."

After thinking for a moment, she said, "Pittsburgh office, then. Local agents."

"Probably." Coming to a three-street intersection, he made a hard left.

"So we assume that Zigler's been reaching out? Sending out information about us?"

"Maybe." Would Zigler have sent out information to other FBI offices when he didn't make any official requests with Carter's workplace? "Could be the Machine putting information into a report."

She turned her head to look at him. "So it could be something as simple as a fake anonymous tip?"

He didn't know if the Machine could do that. "Okay then. Assuming that the phone calls are what got us back on the grid—that means they didn't know for sure where we even were." And he'd given them away with that move at the stoplight. But that meant that the FBI hadn't had enough time to set up a trap; they had been trying to verify an inexact location.

Stuck in Pittsburgh doing defensive driving wasn't like being in New York City and going on the offense. But at this point he felt reasonably certain that they'd shaken any car tailing them. These residential streets wouldn't have cameras, so as long as they stayed out of view and found a different car, they would be off the grid again.

Except that now the Machine—and the FBI—knew they were in the Pittsburgh area. Time to move elsewhere, even without any of the other supplies he'd been planning to get here.

* * *

Eastern Ohio started off with a similar look to Pennsylvania—green hills, small towns on the state highways. Fewer of them, and hardly any with the -burg suffix, he noted.

Pittsburgh. While his best guess was that the Machine found them with the phone call to his voice mail, he honestly didn't know. The Machine could have located them some other way and waited for them to get to a town with an FBI office; all of this was guesswork.

His top priority was to protect Carter. Next, find out more about the Machine. At some point he would need to find a way to contact Finch and still keep Carter safe—seemingly diametrically opposed goals at this point.

Carter was back to grilling him for information, taking more notes about the Machine. Occasionally he took turns as well, using the question and answer time to find out more of what she'd learned about Finch. She had different pieces of the puzzle that was Harold; putting them together would help them understand the mind of the person who built the Machine. So he listened as Carter talked about bluffing her way into IFT's records at the Securities and Exchange Commission—something that Finch had first made her try months before, when they were investigating Adam Saunders.

The drive went by quickly, in spite of the back roads. John had caught glimpses of Carter's work side before, focused and bright, quick to make intuitive leaps. Now he glanced at her as he drove, watching her purse her lips as she thought, her careful handwriting as she took notes. He spotted her wincing as she wrote, but since she refrained from mentioning the pain, he didn't do more than dole out acetaminophen and ibuprofen at the appropriate intervals.

What he didn't discuss with Carter was his ongoing uncertainty about destroying Finch's Machine. He knew he would need evidence; hopefully he would find a safe way to talk to Finch about it. He also didn't tell Carter that she was his first mission. She would argue that she could take care of herself—which was true, but he was the reason she was in this situation. If he hadn't been so willing to involve her in their cases, if he'd pressed Finch after that first time to keep her away from them... but Reese had wanted her there, wanted her admiring and admonishing him.

John pushed away that thought and told himself that it made sense to take time and find a way to mitigate the potential consequences of her continued help, not just eliminate the immediate danger.

They continued driving west. While Cincinnati and its suburbs had a larger population, Columbus had a university. That meant plenty of computer equipment. Also, Columbus didn't have an FBI office.

Carter interrupted his train of thought. "I need to know exactly what we have."

"What do you mean?"

"Money, weapons, anything else. Our assets." She stared at the road ahead as she spoke, her fingers gripping the notepad he'd bought her at a gas station.

"You've seen all the weapons," he told her.

She snorted. "Yeah, you just _happened _to be wearing the contents of an armory." He'd been carrying his usual SIG-Sauer, with a Smith & Wesson air weight strapped to his ankle. Plus the sub-machine gun he'd grabbed right before going to find Carter, and the two revolvers from the stash kit.

He resisted making a statement about the pot calling the kettle black. Too bad they didn't have access to her collection of weaponry right now, just her preferred Glock.

"Plus about twenty thousand dollars," he added. The money had come from some drug dealers who'd been planning to shoot their way through the neighborhood association trying to get rid of them. He'd kept it as a backup, in case he wasn't able to access Finch's seemingly infinite financial resources at some point; another lesson learned from Caroline Turing.

"Also, there's a fake ID and credit card that are probably unusable."

She turned her head toward him, a confused expression resolving to one of understanding. "Because the Machine knows about that ID."

He nodded.

"Twenty thousand," she said, her voice trailing off. He wondered what she was thinking. Reese knew that the money wouldn't last long if they ended up trying to get fake IDs for both of them, or any other unusual supplies.

* * *

Even taking the back roads, they reached the outskirts of Columbus by early afternoon. It didn't take long to notice that the area was still affected by the housing crisis. "For Rent" signs dotted neighborhoods in multiple parts of the city. Deciding to take advantage of it, Reese stopped at a strip mall with several shops; they both bought clothes and a few other supplies, taking care to pick stores that didn't have visible cameras. Afterward they found an empty rental house with running water.

Neither of them complained about the cold shower, their first chance to clean up properly since... _Just two days_, thought Reese. Carter had been shot two days ago. Somehow it seemed longer than that.

Reese showered first, and then flipped through Carter's notes while she took a turn. The house didn't contain any furniture, so he sat on the floor in the living room, looking through the notepad. The handwriting wasn't her usual crisp lettering, but it was still legible. At the top of the second page she had written "Contact Taylor" and circled the words.

While he doubted that the FBI would do anything more than ask Taylor questions—if they even went that far—he was certain that Carter would normally be in regular contact with her son. Taylor would worry, especially if the FBI did speak to him.

Flipping to the next page, he saw the phrase _facial recognition software—access_. He'd been curious about that himself. While Finch was a genius at creating computer programs, the technology that went into making those kinds of programs was sophisticated, time-consuming and very specific.

Unless Finch had designed the Machine to use someone else's work. It would make sense—the Machine had access to every e-mail and cell phone conversation; why couldn't it use the best software programs as well?

We're playing against impossible odds, he thought, and felt almost light-headed. He picked up her pen and wrote "Machine may have access to all kinds of software." Voice recognition was the first that came to mind; voice stress analysis as well.

Carter walked into the empty living room and stood, watching him read her notes. She looked tired.

"Can you help me rebandage my arm?" she asked. Handing him the tape and gauze, she sat on the floor next to him.

The bruising around the furrow made a huge dark circle on her skin, although the swelling had gone down slightly since the last time he checked it. He dabbed more antibiotic cream onto the furrow itself, frowning at the torn skin he'd joined together. It was going to leave a scar. Carter didn't say anything as he gently taped the gauze over the area, but he could hear her breathing quicken.

"Maybe we should get you some antibiotics." He worried about the possibility of infection.

"Or just some oil of oregano at a health food store." At his inquisitive stare, she gave him an embarrassed smile. "Hippy mother," she said as an explanation. "Every time I've ever gotten hurt or sick, she's always found some strange remedy." She shrugged with her left shoulder and added, "And they usually helped."

Carter had a hippy mother. That was not at all what he expected; the incongruity of it amused him.

"Anyway, I'll live. Hurts like hell, though."

"I'm sorry."

Instead of giving a verbal response, she laced the fingers of her left hand with his right hand and squeezed for a second before letting go again. She leaned against the wall, letting both arms relax at her sides and closing her eyes.

"So what are we looking at next?" she asked, eyes still closed.

He'd been thinking about this during the drive. "We need a safe way to contact Finch." A way that wouldn't put her at risk again, he added mentally. "Also, something to communicate with each other if we're separated."

Opening her eyes again, she said, "Radio for short distances. Something with frequency-hopping spread spectrum. You've worked with that before." He half-expected her to focus on that subject and start grilling him about his time working with Latimer's team of military veterans, when he'd been trying to figure out Joey Durban's motivation for pulling bank jobs.

Instead she said, "The Army was using SCIP years ago. I'm sure the technology's still evolving." Secure Communications Interoperability Protocol was the Department of Defense's first attempt at secure cell phones.

John propped his hands on his knees. "Military, FBI, CIA—they're all using encrypted cell phones in the field. Some versions of that encryption are available to the public now."

"Stands to reason that they're not going to release any version of it until they have something better. And I know one place where they'd have that tech." She stopped talking and stared down, shaking her head with an unreadable expression on her face.

"What?"

Carter glanced at him. "Columbus has the Defense Supply Center." Her face had a mixture of remorse and rebelliousness.

The DSCC; she was right, they would have encrypted cell phones, the radios, all of it made to military spec.

"Okay, then. Think I'll pay them a visit."

She raised an eyebrow at that. "I?"

"Show me how high you can lift that arm now." He gave her an innocent smile in response to her glare.

She raised her arm up to about shoulder level, keeping her expression carefully neutral, then lowered it again.

"Right. Now do it again, only keep it there holding this." He handed her the Glock 19. It was the pistol she'd had in her gun belt the day they'd met.

Carter made a face after trying it for a few seconds. "Okay, fine, you've made your point."

"Sorry," he repeated.

"Right. I'd believe that if I didn't already know how much you like to go charging in by yourself." Carter leaned against the wall again. "Let's talk logistics, then." Handing him the notepad, she said, "I vote you act as scribe right now."

He took the notepad and picked up the pen as well. Not that he needed them; he'd always had a good memory for details. "What do you know?" His own knowledge of the DSCC was limited. It was a military supply installation in Columbus, storing inventory for all branches of the US military.

"Okay, one of my friends lived on the base for a while. Not a big population, but enough people for an exchange. At least, there was then."

An exchange on base would have a few basic groceries and a lot of liquor. The military catered to what its members wanted; he'd never had trouble getting alcohol when he'd been with the Rangers.

"Oh, and I think the installation is right across from a mall, weirdly enough."

He huffed out a breath in amusement. "What about the inventory?"

"There are a lot of warehouses with equipment. I have no idea which buildings hold what. I doubt my friend knew, either."

"Security?"

She shifted her legs, pulling her knees up and resting her hands on them. "The Marines are in charge. That's all I know."

"Okay, then. Let's go take a drive."

Columbus had plenty of late-afternoon traffic congestion. Reese drove past the DSCC; it was indeed bordered by a large strip mall along the south, and an airport and freeway to the north. He caught glimpses of concrete buildings, Quonset huts and warehouses. Several trees lined the back of the shopping area; they offered an easy way to get up higher and examine the security.

* * *

He left Carter at the empty house in the middle of the night, first breaking into a sporting goods store. He took a pair of binoculars, boxes of ammunition and a few other supplies. Then he spent part of that night and the next morning climbing trees and buildings, looking over the base. Potentially he could infiltrate it on foot. The chain-link fence surrounding the perimeter road was topped with strips of barbed wire; easily breached. More problematic were the cameras; almost every utility pole had one mounted on it. The longer he could avoid the cameras, the more trouble he would save himself.

The guards at the gate required ID for all arrivals, but their inspection of arriving vehicles was cursory, especially for delivery trucks. If he had some way of knowing that a particular truck had the supplies they needed, he would skip breaking into the base altogether, but right now he had no way of getting that information.

Reese did have one lucky break: spotting which warehouse was most likely to hold the comm equipment, thanks to the size, shape and apparent weight of the items that the guards took from it to load onto a truck.

On his way back to the rental house he picked up clothes similar to what the guards wore, food, a laptop, and a couple of flash drives. He went through the back door, quietly announcing himself as he entered.

Carter was in the living room, holding the Glock in her left hand in a classic bull's-eye stance, her body perpendicular to the wall she was aiming at. No bullet holes in the wall; boredom hadn't led her that far yet.

"You've shot with your left hand before?" he asked.

"Sometimes. When I'm at the shooting range, yeah."

For his own training, he had worked for weeks with different pistols and revolvers to get as comfortable and accurate with his right hand as with his left, then continued training with both. It was a useful skill when he worked with the Rangers. Regular Army wouldn't have taught that to Carter; she was just competitive when it came to firearms. He wouldn't have given her the FS2000 assault rifle if he hadn't been sure she could handle it.

"If anything does happen, you're probably better off going with your usual grip," he told her.

"I know."

He didn't bother telling her that adrenaline and necessity would take care of part of her hesitation at raising that arm. As for steadiness in repeated firing, only time and healing would return that to her. She already knew all that from her time in Iraq.

They sat on the floor to eat, Carter asking him about what he'd seen at the base in between bites of food.

"Chain-link fence, barbed wire on top... and there's an empty space between the road and the fence. Thirty yards of plain pavement," he told her. "Easy to move through, no one to stop me once the patrol has driven past, but there are cameras all over the place. I'd rather avoid them going in."

"So what are you going to do instead?"

"We don't have time to get a fake ID made." Not to mention that his face would be recorded at close range by the camera in the gatehouse. "Think I'll hitch a ride on one of the delivery trucks. Most of them go through this intersection." He pointed to a spot on the map of Columbus on the floor next to them.

He looked at her as she stared at the map, fork held close to her mouth in her left hand. "Their security detail is young. Inexperienced," he told her. "They're not checking the vehicles closely enough to notice someone on the roof. And on the base they move through the same patterns over and over again."

"Not surprising," she said, and shook her head. "It's way too easy to fall into a routine on the job. Especially if they live on base as well."

"You lived on base?" he asked.

"Just for a couple of months, while we were looking for housing. How about you?"

"Yeah. I never really cared much as long as I had a roof over my head." Multiple bases, multiple states; they blurred together in his mind now.

Carter glanced up at the ceiling of the rental house and then look at him with a wry grin. "This beats the barracks, at any rate. Or a tent in Afghanistan."

Later he took a nap, trying to ignore the still, warm air in the house. Carter typed on the laptop, the Glock next to her. The noise of fingers tapping on the keyboard was soothing; John hadn't realized he was missing that sound in his ear until he heard it again.

After his nap they spent more time going over plans to deal with various scenarios. While he preferred to work alone, he'd forgotten that the advantages of two minds working on the same problem. Carter's military experience hadn't included combat posts, but she'd had years of working with the NYPD planning different ops.

They ate dinner in the car, driving around near the mall again. Initially he planned to leave the base through the northern boundary, leading to the airport's terrain; from there he could hike back to the intersection where he planned to climb up a truck. Carter suggested that she drive the car to one of the fast food restaurants along the southern side instead, and that he meet her there. She pointed out that there was no reason to go back to the abandoned house once they had the comm equipment.

"Besides," she argued, "we can use the burner phones for texting if we need to change plans. Just a plain _meet me here _kind of text isn't going to set off any alarms."

"You think you can drive?"

She gave him a look. "My arm's still here. It's not like it fell off or something. Yeah, if I have to drive more than a few minutes, it'll hurt, and I'm not up for any kind of stunt driving, but I'll manage."

* * *

That decision—to go to the southern edge and meet Carter rather than going to the northern boundary—was probably what saved him from getting caught.

After climbing down from the truck that he rode into the complex, he carefully traced a path along the shadows of the trucks parked near some of the buildings. Poor planning, he thought, allowing vehicles to park here overnight. He could avoid most of the cameras thanks to them. Not that the cameras posed an immediate threat—a live surveillance feed was only as good as the people watching it, and nighttime meant a boring, color-leached palette of images.

The Machine, however, didn't get bored.

He also avoided most people by skirting the vehicles, although one guard spotted him. For a moment he wished that he'd taken Carter's suggestion about bringing a stun gun. He'd never killed anyone by accident while executing a sleeper hold, but using it made him... not nervous, but very aware of the fragility of the human body. The guard went down after a few seconds, still breathing. Reese tied him up and left him between two convoy trucks.

The warehouse doors had new security that he bypassed by climbing to the roof on another of the ubiquitous trucks for a boost. Get in, get out—the items he wanted were listed on an inventory sheet, along with their location on the shelves. Military organization: worked great except when it didn't.

Getting out of the base took longer than getting in, since he was walking to the south fence. He could have hotwired one of the trucks, but decided against it. The base wasn't that large, and while the city had ambient noise, he didn't want to add to it with the sound of the motor.

He'd brought a can of wasp spray to use on the surveillance cameras if needed; most of them were high enough that he could navigate a path to avoid having his face show up. He'd taken the guard's hat, and his clothes were chosen to match the style they wore. His backpack, now holding the cell phones and radios, would be the only element incompatible with a guard's outfit.

After spraying the camera angled toward the south fence, John clambered over the barrier, using wire cutters on the thin barbed wire at the top. Carter was waiting in the car, parked next to the fast food restaurant not far from the fence he'd scaled, an expression of relief on her face. Reese took the driver's seat and pulled into traffic on Broad Street. Fewer cars on the road than in daylight, but even at night, there was enough traffic to reassure him and make him more aware at the same time.

It was the sound that filtered through first—the sustained thump of helicopters. Carter, wearing a hat that she'd bought earlier, turned and looked to the north. "I don't see them yet," she said. "Sounds like at least two."

After a moment she added, "One heading south, I still can't see the others." South towards them; presumably any other helicopters were moving farther away rather than closer.

Oh fuck, he thought, and kept his hands curled tightly around the steering wheel.

Deploying helicopters now, in the middle of the night—this wasn't the standard reaction to a potential break-in. Reese continued heading west on Broad Street, grateful that the road still had plenty of other cars, even in the middle of the night.


	4. Chapter 4

He drove for over ten hours. John didn't let it show, but he felt a certain level of panic, more than he'd allowed himself to feel in a very long time. Judging from her ongoing note-taking and questioning, Carter was a hell of a lot calmer than he was. Maybe because she still had her original goal in mind: take down the Machine. Not that either of them had any idea how to actually accomplish that.

He'd been hoping to prove his theory wrong, but instead he had more evidence that he was probably right. And he still didn't have an easy way to contact Finch without putting Carter in more danger.

After a quick stop in Memphis for food and a few more supplies, Reese found a place to pull over: an empty stretch of land not far from the Mississippi. He napped for a bit and then questioned Carter while he decided where to go next. Cities they'd visited before and places where they had friends or relatives were out of the question. Reese suggested that they try cities along the Gulf of Mexico, because the Machine wouldn't have eyes on the water—not like on land, at any rate. He preferred to have an escape route in case they needed it.

That's how they ended up in Houston. Carter slept some along the way; it was still dark when they arrived, although the sky was turning light along the eastern horizon.

After another nap break—timed to wait out the morning traffic jams—he drove them around the city, trying to learn the area and figure out what to do next.

He hadn't known much about Houston before. The sky here was almost opaque, a pale milky blue from the haze of humidity and pollution. The city sprawled, buildings strewn in seemingly haphazard fashion across miles of land; an entirely different kind of town than New York City.

Pockets of urban decay near skyscrapers—that was still familiar. The ring of suburbs around the big city as well; he catalogued as much as he could as he drove, Carter navigating with an unfolded map of the area.

She rubbed her eyes and picked up the map again, watching his hands on the steering wheel, zoning out. He knew that feeling. It was past time for a break from the car, from driving.

"What we need is internet access," she told him.

"What we need is a safe place to stay," he countered.

Carter took off the hat for a moment and massaged her scalp. "Okay. I'll take care of a place to stay. You figure out how we're going to get internet access."

He glanced at her. "You have something in mind?"

"Maybe. Drive back to the south part of the six-ten loop," she ordered.

He couldn't complain (much) about her not giving details, considering his own tendencies. Following her directive, he drove south of downtown again until the road they were on intersected with Loop 610.

"West or east?" he asked.

"East." A couple of minutes later she told him, "Exit here, I'm getting out."

Unable to help himself, he said, "Watch out for cameras."

She rolled her eyes. "I'll watch. But I'm wearing a hat. And I'm walking slow." They had discussed the possibility that the Machine had gait analysis. "Maybe I'll throw some hip action into it," she said dryly.

"Maybe I'll stick around and watch." He looked at her face, waiting for the dimple to pop in her cheek as she tried not to smile.

Schooling her features again, she said, "I'll text you soon." He noticed the deliberate way she said it—no promises of any results. Whatever her idea was, she wasn't sure it would work.

It was time to switch vehicles again. Might as well tie that into Carter's request for internet; he'd been thinking about it anyway. After finding a vehicle that fit their needs, he literally ditched the current car, driving it into a leafy ravine and then walking back to the mini-van he'd picked.

Then he drove around, looking for computer stores that carried the kind of supplies he wanted. Not the big chains; he was looking for locally owned places that would have unusual gear. If they didn't appear to have security networked in somewhere, he went in and bought supplies, paying with cash. Otherwise he made a list of the stores to revisit later with a lock pick.

The cell phone in his right-hand pocket beeped twice; Carter's text read, "May have something, meet me." She included a street corner; he sent a reply that told her to look for a gray mini-van.

Driving back to the south side took twenty minutes. Carter was waiting for him in the shade; she walked to the mini-van and climbed in, making an amused face. "Feel like a soccer mom yet?" she teased.

He glanced at her; she had an amused smile on her face. "No, but give it time."

"So I went to the salon and used a sob story and I have a name and number. Someone who might give us a place to stay for a few days, no paperwork needed."

It took him a moment to notice that her hair was shorter. The hat mostly hid it, but it was definitely shorter than before. He was surprised; in New York City Carter made regular treks across town to see the hairstylist she'd been going to for years.

She went on. "You'll have to stay out of sight at the apartment, but I got something in mind if you get spotted, so..."

Joss was clearly pleased with herself and trying hard not to show it; he stifled a grin of his own. "Didn't know you had experience doing undercover work, Detective."

She huffed out a laugh. "Nah, that's not my style. But bluff someone? I can do that." The difference being how long you had to maintain the story; he could see that about her.

Apparently she could maintain the bluff long enough for their purposes. She got hold of the contact person and by that evening they were ensconced in a tiny one-bedroom apartment with minimal furnishings. The location wasn't bad and it had functional air-conditioning, which was what mattered most. He'd figured out how to give them time for safe internet access, but that meant sleeping during the hottest part of the day; Houston was too warm and humid to be without a good air conditioner.

Reese went to a tiny local supermarket and brought back food. "You're going to have to tell me my potential role in your sob story," he told her after taking a bite of his sandwich.

"Right." Inside the apartment she refused to wear _that damn hat_, as she called it. Her new hairstyle was short enough that it didn't quite brush her shoulders unless she shrugged. It looked good on her. "I walked around the area and picked a salon that was busy—someplace where I knew I'd have to wait for a while. And I kept talking about how I had a cheating boyfriend and that I needed to get away from him for a while without him finding me—that I didn't trust myself not to go back to him if he begged me for forgiveness."

Clever. Just enough pathos to elicit sympathy, not so much that anyone would call the police or investigate further. "Is my role the cheating boyfriend?"

She shot him a mischievous look. "Not exactly. If someone sees you, then I'm actually the one doing the cheating, and you're the guy I'm cheating with."

Reframing them as the villains of the story—a twist that wouldn't result in interference from someone telling her not to take her boyfriend back. "Nice," he told her, admiring the neatness of it.

She tilted her head in wordless acknowledgment of the compliment. "Recycled story. I used it once before when I was tracking a suspect who ducked out of sight by renting an apartment off the books."

With a safe place to stay for now they quickly fell into a routine: during the daytime one of them would sleep in the bedroom while the other kept watch in the living room. She slept in the morning; he cleaned the weapons one at a time, or exercised, or read through Carter's notes. Early afternoon they would eat something and run any errands that needed to be done during business hours. (There was always an errand to run; John finally decided that Carter thought them up as a way to get outside while the sun was still up.) John slept after that while she typed notes or did yoga.

Late evenings they scrounged some more food and shared ideas from their enforced quiet in the daytime. Each night they drove to a different Houston suburb, driving around different subdivisions until they found available wi-fi. Hacking networks took time, but enough homes had unsecured systems that it wasn't a problem. From the back of the van they used the internet access to research questions they had about the Machine; nothing direct that would draw attention to their searches, but anything that could give them more information.

Keeping out of sight during the daytime made sense. While no US city was as heavily surveilled as New York City, Houston had its share of cameras; most of them didn't have any special filters or settings for nights.

But after three days of this, he was getting antsy. Three days in Houston, four days on the run together before that. It wasn't the enforced company; while Carter had her moments of stridence and she really wasn't a morning person (or a just waking up person, since their schedule wasn't normal), he was comfortable around her.

And that was part of it, really. He shouldn't be letting himself feel so at ease—not with her. Comfortable enough to continue the teasing they'd always done before, but this time there wasn't the safety of retreating to their separate worlds after the flirtation.

It meant that the hours together inside the back of a cramped mini-van each night were both more appealing and more volatile. And then each afternoon he slept in the same bed where she'd been sleeping earlier.

"Okay, we need to make a list of what the Machine wants." Carter's voice was low but determined; even with the windows up, they tried to keep conversation quiet in the van, in case anyone walked by in the middle of the night.

He'd taken out the seats in the back of the mini-van; Joss was leaning against the side wall, one of the laptops next to her, her knees pulled up. They were both wearing lightweight exercise clothes: shorts and tee-shirts.

"It's a machine. It doesn't want anything." He'd had a different response the night before; this discussion was ongoing, and he still didn't have answers to satisfy her.

She raised both eyebrows. "Should we talk about satisfying its protocol standards instead?" After a moment she huffed out a laugh. "What are the Machine's protocol standards in regards to knowledge of its existence?" she asked with a pompous voice.

John wiped the sweat from his forehead; Houston didn't cool down enough overnight to make the enclosed van comfortable. "The set-up keeps the Machine secret. I don't know if the Machine itself is programmed for that."

They'd been talking about Henry Peck again earlier, so Reese added, "Peck just didn't let it slide when some of his reports were altered. I don't think Finch made the Machine to have self-defense, though. It's the information about Finch that's the key."

For her, anyway—the reason why she was targeted. People had gone after Peck of their own volition, not the Machine's.

As soon as he said Finch's name, a dark look crossed Carter's face. An ironic twist that Carter had so many doubts about Finch when John was the one who had killed people. Finch might feel guilty about what he'd ignored in the past, but it couldn't compare to the literal blood Reese had had on his hands before.

Carter clicked something else on her laptop. John said, "As for why Finch's information is a big secret, well, Finch was the programmer, and he's... paranoid. Secretive." Both accurate descriptions; it still felt like a betrayal to say them out loud to her when Finch wasn't able to hear them.

"He's God," replied Carter. John looked at her in surprise. "To the Machine, he is. The creator, whatever other word you want to use." She sighed. "I just—there are too many things we still don't know."

She leaned forward, resting her head against her knees, wrapping her hand around the front of her calves. He brushed his hand against her temple before turning back to his computer to look again at satellite photos of Arizona.

They'd made a list of hypotheses about the Machine: that its physical location would require a large share of electricity; that the drives and other hardware required for this level of information analysis would require space the size of a city block (if not more), that it wouldn't necessarily be above ground, that it would probably be located in the western part of the US—away from any large metropolitan areas, making the intermountain west more probable...

The questions about the Machine's functions, however—what it wanted, as Carter had asked—those questions left them literally and figuratively working in the dark.

He was tired of it. Tired of fruitless guessing, tired of watching Joss's increasing frustration, knowing that she couldn't just go home and see her son because she'd gotten involved in this crusade. Because he'd wanted her there.

Reese pulled back the dark fabric blocking the windows. At the edge of the horizon he could see the faintest hint of light. "Want to go for a swim before we head back?" he asked.

Carter raised her head and made a noise in the back of her throat. "Didn't bring my swimsuit."

"You could go skinny-dipping," he teased, watching to see what reaction Carter would have.

She shook her head. "Are you serious about going swimming?"

He'd walked around the area earlier, just as he always did before choosing to stay somewhere. A clean-cut white guy wearing jogging clothes didn't draw that much attention, even in the middle of the night. This particular subdivision connected to an empty block; no houses after this set. The Houston area was full of these gaps between neighborhoods and cities, emphasizing that space wasn't at a premium here.

"Everyone's asleep here," he told her, indicating the house with the unsecured internet, "and no one's home next door, and they have a pool."

"Are you just looking for a reason for someone to chase us again?"

Her eyebrows slanted down, but he could tell she was tempted by the idea. Shrugging, he said, "They'd be chasing us for trespassing, not anything else." It was an impetuous idea, but the risk was minimal.

"People are armed in Texas."

"Carter, _we're _armed." He stopped making arguments after that and waited.

Sure enough, after another minute she said, "Okay."

"Okay? That's it?"

"Okay, but I'm not actually skinny-dipping." He hadn't expected her to anyway; it was another way to rile her. "And I reserve the right to say I told you so if something does go wrong." She shut down the laptop.

Reese made sure everything was secured in the van. Just before they slipped out, he said, "You'll need to keep quiet, you know. Sound carries on the water."

She turned and raised one eyebrow at him. "This isn't the first time I've done this," she replied. "Me and my cousins used to sneak over to their neighbor's house to swim in the middle of the night." Her cousins in Virginia, he assumed; as far as he knew, Carter didn't have any family in New York other than her son and mother.

They walked quietly into the back yard, Carter looking both excited and nervous in spite of her past experience. They stripped down to their underwear, avoiding eye contact with each other. Funny how even now, after everything he'd experienced, he could still feel that flash of awkwardness, however brief, in a situation like this.

Carter went into the pool first, walking down the steps and then plunging in. He followed. The water wasn't cold, but it was cool enough in contrast with the stifling air in the back of the mini-van. The chlorine felt sharp in his nostrils as he breathed in, but in a pleasantly nostalgic way.

When he was younger—what felt like multiple lifetimes ago—the pool had been one of his favorite places.

Close to the horizon the moon was almost full, fuzzy around the edges from the haze. The half-grown trees in the back yard made ghostly shadows on the ground.

Carter went from swimming underwater to a side stroke, switching dominant arms for each lap. If she'd been at home, she would've had doctor's check-ups, maybe some physical therapy appointments to make sure everything was healing as it should. Instead she had her own stubborn insistence on using the arm even when it was painful.

Reese went underwater, swimming several yards close to the bottom of the pool. The concrete finish scraped his knuckles a few times. Surfacing for air, he located Carter and tugged her ankle once, just for the hell of it. She stopped swimming long enough to make a face at him and then switched to floating on her back.

They both ended up at the deep end of the pool, holding on to the edge, looking at the back of the house. Carter alternated between treading water and pushing her legs up.

"I miss swimming in the ocean," she said quietly.

He surprised himself by volunteering, "I never liked it much. The Pacific was always was too cold." His family had lived in various cities in California, Oregon and Washington—always looking for a prosperity that was just out of reach.

"Swimming lessons," Carter said abruptly, not bothering to explain or make a question of the words. She looked tired, but not like he's been seeing all too often lately—tiredness from the late (or early) hour rather than from hopelessness.

"I was scared to put my face in the water."

She turned and looked at him, a slow smile spreading across her face. "You were. Huh." A few seconds later she added, "I don't really remember if I was," her voice trailing off.

The moon had sunk below the horizon; he could barely see the beads of water on her skin. Her short hair was slicked against her scalp except for one strand clinging to her cheek. He thought about pushing it back, about tracing that curve to her ear.

Carter said something, and then turned and swam to the ladder. _Time to leave_, that's what she had said. Past time; John pulled himself up the edge of the pool and walked over to his pile of clothes.

During the drive back to the apartment Carter was talkative rather than taciturn. The two previous nights she'd been quiet, her mood low after so much fruitless speculation. Now she was telling him an anecdote about working the late shift after her transfer to the seventy-first precinct. "Thank God it only lasted a few months," she concluded. "Taylor was eight, and he had to stay with my mother every evening that I had work."

Reese thought about working overnight with the Rangers. Some of the time that meant crawling through tunnels with his teammates; not always bad memories. Other times it meant wearing a ghillie suit and staying still for hours, waiting for a target to come in range.

Best not to dwell on some of those overnight jobs he'd done with the CIA; the faces still haunted his nightmares.

Finch probably knew more about them than anyone else alive, other than Mark Snow. Reese was certain that Finch had accessed records about his time there and with the Army. And while Carter had her doubts about the man, Reese had faith in his good intentions.

As ridiculous as the idea was, he'd decided to mail one of the extra encrypted phones to the insurance business Finch had under the name Harold Wren. He could imagine Finch's reaction: _You're going to trust the vagaries of the US postal service? _Better than doing nothing.

Reese finally noticed the silence in the van. He turned; Carter had an inquisitive look on her face.

"What?" he asked.

She shook her head. "Never mind. You were a million miles away from here."

"Sorry."

Carter shrugged, looking untroubled. He was usually better at this—at keeping up a conversation and making plans at the same time.

When they got back, he walked up to the apartment, feet squelching damply in his shoes. Carter waited nearby while John went through his usual routine of checking for intruders.

After showering, he let Carter have the bathroom and bedroom. He picked up some fruit from the kitchen and sat on the couch, eating and skimming through a copy of the Houston Chronicle. While choosing a city that neither of them had visited was a logical choice to avoid patterns the Machine—or humans—might detect, it made getting some supplies difficult.

He wanted that extra layer of protection that a fake ID offered. That was part of what he'd researched online their first night. He'd gone out the second night and started working on contacts. This evening he was supposed to meet someone in person. It was problematic; he didn't want to bring down more trouble, but doing nothing wasn't an option either. And staying long enough in one area to find the kind of contacts he needed meant that their activities were more likely to be noticed.

In the afternoon when it was his turn to sleep, he found himself staring at the ceiling instead. He was lying on top of the sheets instead of under them, hands twisted in the fabric as he tried not to tried not to worry about Finch, tried not to think about losing Carter, avoided imagining Carter asleep in this same bed hours ago...

* * *

Last night they'd driven east of Houston; tonight they were in a suburb on the western edge. Reese had two windows open on his laptop: one to search for information about power plants in Arizona, the other to look for new leads on false papers. The contact he'd met with before going out with Carter didn't do the kind of work Reese wanted.

Last he knew, Joss had been paralleling his search, looking at details about the electrical power grid in the west. He was good at following people, watching for the smallest detail; she had more patience sifting through other kinds of information.

Even her patience was finite, apparently. The laptop was on the van floor; her legs were sprawled in front of her, her hands clenched in frustration. "I'm just not sure what the Machine wants."

The same question again; just to change it up, he replied, "World peace?"

She gave him a look. "Anyone ever tell you that you have a smart mouth?" she asked. Their glances caught and suddenly the question felt more fraught than it should have.

"All the time," he said.

She looked away first and muttered, "I'll bet." Looking down, Joss grabbed a pen rather than pick up the laptop again. He surreptitiously watched her flip it around in her fingers, glare at it, and drop it before she looked in his direction again.

John didn't notice just how much his boundaries had eroded over this past week until he was already kissing her. Even then it took a moment for the realization to kick in, because she was kissing him back, one of her hands curling around his shoulder and the other behind his neck, holding him in place.

The quiet and warmth in the van felt like a blanket shielding them from the outside world. Joss pulled her head back for a moment, switching angles and then pushing her body closer to his. His mouth strayed to the corner of hers, to her eyelids, returning to her lips each time, reveling in the sound of her quick breaths. With his left hand he drew a line up her throat to her ear; she shivered and whispered his name.

He didn't know how long they stayed like that; deep, wet kisses and hands tracing patterns into shoulders and necks. Joss stroked the back of his neck, fingertips sliding upward into his hair.

Still kissing him, she moved her right hand down, pressing against his abdomen through his shirt. Suddenly she pulled back slightly, tilting her head down and resting her forehead against his shoulder, taking deep breaths.

As his head cleared John wasn't sure what she would do next. He didn't know what to say or do himself.

After several seconds of silence and stillness she finally raised her head again. "This isn't the best idea right now," she said.

He'd been expecting something more along the lines of _What the hell were you thinking?_, so he couldn't help but be amused at her uncharacteristic tactfulness. "Yeah," he concurred.

She looked like she might say something else; instead she scooted back again, untangling her legs and grabbing her laptop. He did the same, grateful to have something to look at that wasn't her. It took him several minutes to focus on what was actually on the screen.

As they both continued using their limited internet time, Reese debated what to say—if anything. He'd made mistakes working with people before, but he'd never crossed this particular line... and what was this line, anyway? Potential victim, asset, partner—it didn't really matter now, because he'd fucked up.

The drive back to the apartment was quiet again. He'd decided that an apology for making a move might be the best course of action—maybe over lunch, or whatever the meal was that they ate between taking turns sleeping and keeping watch.

Checking the apartment led to different plans, though. He carefully opened the door and knew immediately that someone had been inside. John motioned for Carter to stay away; she watched, eyes wide as he went inside.

No one there now; whoever had been in their apartment was long gone. Reese and Carter had both been careful each time they went out, making sure they didn't leave anything behind that might reveal anything. In fact, the place barely looked occupied; their most significant acquisitions since leaving New York City had all been tech-related, and all of those supplies were still in the back of the mini-van, waiting to be carried inside.

Speaking of the van—John walked to the apartment door to note that Carter had already anticipated his next thought. She'd gone down to the parking lot to check between the vehicles parked closest to theirs. She gave him an all-clear sign.

John walked around the small apartment one last time, checking for any vital supplies. Nothing that couldn't be replaced, and they were better off not taking anything with them. The intruder could have been someone looking to make a quick score, grab something to sell. Or it could have been someone planting bugs, trackers, or cameras.

They had no way of knowing. He went down to the parking lot. "Someone went in while we were out," he told her. "I don't know if they were targeting us specifically or just looking to steal something, but—"

"Time to leave," she concluded.

"Yes."

They climbed into the mini-van. He drove out of the parking lot and headed for the highway, watching the cars, trucks and SUVs as they went east.

"I have a really bad idea," he finally said.

She turned toward him and raised one eyebrow. "Do you have any other kind?" The hint of humor in her eyes took away any sting from the comment.

"Yeah, well. You're not going to like it."

She didn't.


	5. Chapter 5

Thank you for the encouraging comments thus far. Even though I don't often hit reply—I'm trying to use my free time to finish writing this—I do read all of them and appreciate the feedback.

* * *

Bad idea or not, they were leaving the US to go to Belize. It was dangerous, time-consuming, and they had no guarantees of results. On the other hand, currently they didn't have enough information to take down the Machine, they still didn't have any fake IDs, and their resources were limited. In short, they had no forward momentum and the Machine had eyes everywhere.

Belize City had few cameras, almost nonexistent security, and a lot of illegal activity for such a small population. Plus he'd hidden a stash there with money and papers, and he'd done so without anyone's knowledge.

After listening to his reasoning about why this should be their next plan, Carter argued about it for the next half hour in the van—and then abruptly conceded, which bewildered John. He didn't question it for now; instead he followed her directive, which was to figure out how to get a message to her mother.

They had speculated that the FBI would have her mother under surveillance, even if no on had brought her in for questioning. Fusco, too—all a guessing game, of course, but at this point they weren't going to risk direct contact. Even indirect contact had its hazards.

Carter wanted the message to be that she was okay and with him. Reese was surprised at the second part, but she was insistent. After getting a message, her mother would call Taylor, and Taylor would know that she was safe. Safe thus far, anyway. Plus Taylor would tell her mother about what John had done for him. Better to reinforce that image than undermine it, mused Reese, and decided to call in a favor from Judge Gates. John already owed Zoe Morgan too many favors after her help in getting Finch back, and she would hardly strike a reassuring figure. Once Carter's mother responded to the message, John figured he could count on the judge telling her about getting Sam Junior back.

They stopped in Beaumont to switch vehicles and make the phone call. Reese wasn't surprised at the judge's irritated tone; no one liked being reminded of their most terrifying experiences, especially parents. But the man agreed to go see Carter's mother in person and pass along a message for which he had no context.

They couldn't linger after making the phone call and putting his voice on an open system. Reese drove east for hours. Carter insisted on taking turns driving, giving him short breaks; it helped, but minimally. He knew that the FBI had perfected techniques of trailing a car without being noticed. In spite of that he couldn't stay asleep more than a few minutes at a time.

They made it all the way to the Florida panhandle before he had to stop for a longer break. Switching cars again in Tallahassee, they then drove the rest of the way to Miami.

Carter had never visited any part of Florida. Reese had brief experience here. Normally he would avoid it for that reason, but right now that made Miami their best option in finding a way to Belize—that and the city's location, almost at the southern tip of the state.

He had a contact of sorts. Not that he intended to talk directly to a man he knew of thanks to the CIA's involvement in the drug trade, but he could do some surveillance, maybe find a lead on how to smuggle himself and Carter to the Caribbean.

Watch the man, look for his connections, observe only. That had been the plan. Somehow it didn't work out that way. He'd noticed two men who appeared unarmed; they'd been talking to one of the people he'd tracked today. Time to alter his strategy and use a direct approach.

He tried asking nicely first. It wasn't a success. Right now John missed the first impression the business suit gave him.

"Hey now, I'm looking for information, not trouble," he repeated. He hadn't yet pulled out any weapons, waiting to see if he could get what he wanted without that extra threat. The taller of the two men didn't seem interested. Reese had managed a few good hits on the shorter man. He was still trying to get to his feet, procrastinating as he did so, from the looks of him. Not anxious to get involved in a fistfight—that was useful information.

"I like trouble better," answered the taller man. He held himself like someone with experience fighting, but not actual training. The difference mattered; it meant that he'd learned to count on being bigger and stronger, and not on specific skills. The man tried a punch; Reese feinted out of reach, waiting. Sure enough, the other guy dropped his shoulder and aimed for Reese's gut; Reese pivoted and used the man's momentum to throw him to the ground. He kicked the man in the middle of his back: encouragement not to get up right away.

Reese grabbed the shorter man by the shoulder and pulled him up the rest of the way, putting the man's neck into the crook of his elbow. He was careful not to press too hard; the man needed a threat, but he also needed to be able to talk. Reese anchored his weight onto his right leg and pushed with his left foot to turn over the taller man. Then he pressed his foot against the man's throat, pushing just enough to make the possibility of harm clear.

"I need a name. The person working the boats. Give me the name," he said, increasing the pressure momentarily.

The smaller man wheezed and made a garbled noise. Reese loosened the choke hold and spun the man around to face him. "Got something to say?"

"_Se llama_," he started out, and then switched back to English. "His name is Molinero."

"That's it?"

"I don't know a first name," the man whimpered.

"Not good enough. Give me a number."

Reese slid his foot slightly, pressing the insole of his foot against the taller man's throat again. "Feel like talking yet?"

The man glared; Reese pulled out the piece he'd hidden in the small of his back and pointed it. "I'll only ask nicely one more time," he said.

The taller man froze for a second. "Okay. My cell phone. I have a number."

Reese lifted his foot, allowing the man to reach into his trouser pocket for the cell. After getting the number, John told them, "Pleasure doing business with you." He could hear the bigger man swearing at his injuries as John left.

If he didn't feel the pressure of time, he would take a few more days and stake out the area, watching for patterns of boat arrivals and departures and make his own contact, maybe even look for a fishing boat to hire for the job. Instead Reese found himself meeting with Molinero—still no first name. Molinero wasn't pleased with his men giving up his information so easily; John pointed out that he'd targeted the lackeys, not the guards, and that better-trained men would result in improved security.

Molinero had a sense of humor and an eye for the bottom line. Comedy and avarice made it easy to come to an understanding about transportation to the Caribbean, with Molinero pointing out that the smuggling he did usually went in the opposite direction. Reese threw in a few veiled threats about safety during the conversation; just because he felt comfortable with the man's business sense didn't mean that Molinero's employees would be as amenable. The price they negotiated would take a significant chunk of the money Reese had, but he had already decided that this was a gamble he was willing to make.

Carter was waiting for him inside the empty house they'd found. Like Columbus, the housing crisis had resulted in foreclosed properties all over Miami. They would only be using this one for a few hours at most.

She had sorted through the small pile of stuff they'd managed to acquire during their time together. He took a look at the collection and put a couple of other items in the stack of things to get rid of. No point in worrying about anything more than the basics. Before they left for Belize, he would put some of the computer and military tech into a stash kit.

He let Carter take watch while he slept the rest of the night.

They had one full day in Miami before leaving at midnight. Carter bought motion sickness meds, Reese bought sunscreen and a bigger flashlight. In the afternoon they huddled inside the house again, cleaning weapons and adding last-minute notes to the documents saved on flash drives: burning up time and nervous energy with busy work.

They went out after the sun went down; the concrete and metal of the city retained the heat, but a cool breeze was blowing inland from Biscayne Bay. After eating sandwiches from a Cuban restaurant, he drove close to the docks and left the car in a parking lot after wiping it for prints. He'd checked the docks earlier for surveillance cameras and noted that they had already been disabled. Someone didn't want their business being observed.

They each carried a half-empty duffel bag with their supplies, although Carter had put some of her share of the money in what she termed the 'bra bank.' Reese kept a straight face at that, although it made him want to smile. Jessica had done the same thing when they'd gone to Mexico together.

He and Carter walked close to the water, finally finding a spot under some palm trees to sit. If they continued walking they would end up going past a string of large houses. John preferred to wait where he had a view of their departure point—not that it was easy distinguish what would be normal activity along a dock frequented by smugglers.

Carter was thinking along the same lines. "I wonder if the people in these expensive houses know what's going on around here?" she asked.

"That's probably what paid for some of the houses," he answered.

The lights from the harbor and from the moon—past full now but still bright—let him see the twist of her mouth in response to his comment. Changing the subject, she asked, "How is it that you have a stash of money and goods in Belize that no one else knows about?"

He leaned back slightly, putting his palms on top of his upraised knees, feeling the bony knobs there. They were both wearing shorts again; no point in dressing up for a sea voyage. "The CIA doesn't have much of a retirement plan," he told her. In two thousand nine he'd finally figured out that he would never be allowed to leave his job; someone would be sent after him.

"Retirement?" she repeated, sounding skeptical.

He debated over giving more details for second, then finally said simply, "You met Mark Snow."

"Right." She drew out the word. "I can see why you'd need a good retirement plan."

He'd taken the money and goods when a CIA op he'd been working with a Mexican drug lord had gone bad. "I was already in Oaxaca, so going east through Guatemala to Belize didn't take long." From Oaxaca in southeastern Mexico he'd crossed the state of Chiapas. The border between Guatemala and Mexico was dominated by jungle and mountain landscapes; not easy to patrol. Belize's frontier was similar. The most difficult part of the trip hadn't been keeping his distance from security patrols, drug smugglers and human traffickers; it had been his time in Belize City.

He'd spent most of his time on that trip trying not to think about Jessica. Mexico already reminded him of being there with her; admitting to himself that he might want to live in spite of all he'd done for this job brought back the recollection of what he'd given up for it. He had told himself that she was better off with Peter. That memory tasted of ashes and whiskey.

The desire to stay alive hadn't lasted long after the realization that he was unlikely to survive quitting the job. After that he just did the work without hope of anything after: no more stash kits for emergency retirement, no planned exit strategies.

Carter curled her legs in toward her chest and sighed. "I promised myself I wouldn't leave him again." She was talking about Taylor, he assumed. "My first time leaving the country since resigning my commission, and I don't even get a stamp in my passport to show for it," she said.

Deflective humor; the stress in her voice wouldn't be noticeable if he didn't know her well. He smiled at her attempted banter.

"Did it feel any different?" she asked.

"What?"

She looked across the harbor. "Working for the CIA. Working for Finch."

"What do you mean exactly?"

Turning toward him, she looked—not angry, but somehow defiant. "Did you think you were doing the right thing before?"

"Yes," he murmured. It was more complicated than that; he'd started out believing that he was working for a good cause, though.

"But then you left, even with Snow's 'retirement plan' in place."

John hadn't told her about Ordos, about the phone call from Jessica, but the details didn't really matter right now. He understood the real question. "You're asking if what we're doing is the right thing," he said.

She blinked and looked down.

"I can't answer that for you." He had re-enlisted for a cause. Worked for the CIA out of belief. Started working for Finch. Maybe the difference was whose moral compass he trusted. He's been improving on that, he thought. Whatever her doubts at this moment, Carter believed that this was right—believed that taking down the Machine was a moral act.

Joss took a few deep breaths that sounded almost like sobs, but her eyes stayed dry. "I might not be trying without the direct threat," she admitted.

"I think you would be." Maybe not getting ready to leave the country, but Carter would be doing something to take down the Machine—or making sure that someone else was. He smiled to himself and said, "It's what the romantic idealists do."

"Romantic?" she scoffed. "If anyone's a romantic, it's you."

"Says the woman with a law degree who's working as a cop." She looked at him in surprise. "Tilting at windmills, Carter? It's only a job for the romantics."

Carter made a noise from the back of her throat; whether that meant she agreed or disagreed, he didn't know. "Pot calling the kettle black?" she suggested, and then shook her head, hiding the smile flitting across her face.

"Maybe."

The word romantic reminded him that he still hadn't brought up the topic of that kiss. Neither had she, though; John decided to leave it alone. He didn't plan trying that again. (Not that he'd planned it the first time; he avoided that thought and abandoned the topic.)

* * *

Three and a half days on the water; Carter coped by taking the motion sickness pills and not talking much. Molinero's crew members on the boat were more professional than his land-based lackeys. Mostly they avoided him and Carter, bringing them food on occasion and sending one English speaking crewmate to tell them when they were close to land. They took turns staying awake; in spite of the crew's apparent disinterest, neither Carter nor Reese felt trusting enough to fare without someone on watch.

Their few conversations generally centered on Belize and what cover stories they would use there; after debating it, they finally settled on posing as an unmarried couple that had recently started dating. "Eight months off and on," Carter told him at one point. It worked well enough, using the time they'd worked together as a dating timeline. John would claim Canadian citizenship, which would also help explain the gaps in their time together. (Carter's New York accent made it impossible for her to try to pose as anything other than American. John didn't even bother asking her. The Belizean locals might not know the difference, but visitors from the US would notice.)

Reese assumed that Molinero or someone else in the organization routinely paid bribes. Their boat was never stopped, never boarded. A routine trip; while Molinero had made it sound like he would be doing a great service to them in bringing them to Belize, the crew was exchanging cargo at each stop.

John knew they were getting close to their destination when the water shifted from turquoise to tan. That was Belize City: bleeding its corruption into the surrounding landscape. Tourists came here by boat or by plane, but they didn't stay. They shopped within the tiny designated safe area and then found transportation to some other part of the country—a part with clean beaches and clear water, or picturesque ruins.

The crew docked their boat north of the tourist zone, amid fishing boats and small yachts. Walking inland, Carter appeared fascinated. From his own experience he knew that Belize City was unlike anything she would have seen in Afghanistan or Iraq. Seeing it through her eyes, he could perceive the dangerous charm: ramshackle houses mixed with graceful Colonial-era mansions, the crawl of traffic through roundabouts, and the humidity adding sheen to everyone's skin.

They were approached by people offering to braid Carter's hair, others trying to sell them marijuana and harder drugs. Minutes later they passed a single file line of children wearing spotless white school uniforms.

Just south of the tourist zone he spotted a hostel that looked clean and more secure than some of the others. The building had stucco with wood railings; the paint was faded pink and purple. Flowering plants were hanging from pots around the building. Someone cared about its appearance.

He'd planned a story about being robbed and having only the cash his girlfriend had hidden in her clothes, but the woman at the desk barely even looked at them as they walked in. She didn't ask for any ID either, taking their American dollars without comment; instead she told them the check-out time in a monotone voice. Then she turned her attention back to a small television in the corner. Apparently they were dismissed.

The room didn't have anything fancy, just a large bed, an older television and a couple of chairs. Carter sat down on one of them and kicked off her shoes. "Too hot," she muttered, and began massaging her feet. He paced around the room, into the bathroom, looking for the best place to conceal some of the weapons.

"Isn't the mattress traditional?" Carter said from the main room as he inspected under the sink.

Funny; it might have to suffice for now, however. He would buy some tools when they went out, to make something more secure.

When he went back into the room, Carter was leaning back in the chair, arms dangling loosely at her side, eyes closed and head tilted back. She cracked one eye open. "You look like hell," she said bluntly.

She looked tired herself, her eyes reddened from lack of sleep and the constant exposure of sunlight reflecting off the water. He wondered if the nausea from motion sickness had subsided for her yet.

"Thanks," he said.

Carter gave him an amused smile. "You're welcome. I'm going to guess that we're not staying in for a nap, though." She was referring to the signs in the lobby, advising guests to avoid going out after dark, and to take extra precautions if going out at night anyway.

"We need supplies anyway," he said. After unpacking their current belongings—and hiding certain items as best they could—they went back outside. They separated for a short time in the various shops, taking care to set up a time and place to meet. It rained for several minutes, but there was no cooling effect due to the already high humidity.

After buying various supplies, including burner phones to use here, they met up again and ate at a Chinese restaurant. "Can't believe I'm in Belize eating Chinese food," Carter said, twisting her fork around some noodles. "Not that it isn't good."

Reese shrugged; the place was clean and close to their hotel, which was all he cared about. "We'll probably have time to try other things." The city had an abundance of restaurants with different ethnic cuisines; for a town this size the population was diverse.

After they ate, Carter went back to their hotel room at his insistence; he didn't want his contact to panic at seeing someone unfamiliar. Three years ago he had been alone. The documents forger, Nayar, had only agreed to see him when Reese gave him a reference: the man in Mexico who had told him about Nayar's work in Belize City.

Nayar had worked just south of the swing bridge. As he approached the building, he didn't get that familiar edgy feeling from being watched—at least not in the same way. People milled in the streets, some listening to music, others watching for unwary tourists, but no one appeared to be acting as guard for a documents forger.

He asked a few people but no one had any information; not that they were willing to share, at any rate. Reese noticed the looks of suspicion as well as the occasional predatory glances.

Damn. He'd try again tomorrow, but he'd been counting on not having to start from scratch in finding a contact for fake papers. No point in asking around right now; while he had a pistol tucked in the small of his back, he wasn't at his best. Too little sleep the last few days, and the meal had only added to his drowsiness. Plus he didn't have much to bargain with, since he hadn't retrieved the stash yet.

After returning to the hotel, Reese moved around some of the furniture and carefully pried up floorboards while Carter took a bath.

While he didn't want the weapons to be easily found by anyone who might come into their room, John also didn't want all of them out of reach. He left one of the pistols and one of the revolvers under the mattress. Carter padded into the main room again, feet bare, wearing loose-fitting shorts and a tee-shirt.

"I vote we both sleep at the same time for a change," she said.

He looked at her in surprise.

"If there's any danger here, it's local," she told him. "And God knows we could both use the rest at this point."

"True," he conceded.

"And I'm willing to bet you could take care of any local threats without raising a sweat." She pursed her lips and added, "Well... without raising more of a sweat."

The room was air-conditioned, but that didn't mean it was cold—just cooler than the outside temperature.

"I can take the floor," he offered.

She didn't quite roll her eyes, but it was a close call. "So could I. Or we could share this nice big bed, which has convenient weapon storage. I think it's bigger than the space we had on the boat."

If she didn't mind, he wasn't going to say no. Treacherously, his mind went to the other possibilities of sharing a bed besides sleeping; he ignored that and went into the bathroom, taking along a bag of supplies he'd bought earlier.

"Don't shave," Carter said from the bedroom.

He poked his head past the bathroom door to peer around the corner. "What?"

"Facial hair might make it more difficult for you to be recognized. Plus you look more... disreputable."

He stifled a smile. "And that's a good thing."

She raised her eyebrows. "It is here."

Not shaving reminded him of his days at the bottom of a bottle. Of pretending to be dead, of learning about Jessica's death. He stared at his reflection in the mirror; long stubble dotted his chin and neck with short black and gray lines. Three days now—the longest he'd gone without shaving since Finch first offered him a job.

This was temporary, he told himself. Part of his current job. He would need to straighten up the edges soon, but for the moment he would leave it untouched.

Sleeping in day clothes wasn't new; nor was sharing a mattress with a woman that he wasn't having sex with. This bed was larger than some of the beds he'd shared with Stanton. It took John a few minutes to shut down the usual train of panicky thoughts he'd been having since Carter got shot. This was easier than usual as he listened to her tell him a story about sharing beds with her cousins during family vacation, then heard her even breathing.

Sunlight was already streaming into the room before he woke up Thursday. Carter had turned at some point, bumping against his arm. He sat up and looked at her; she was lying on her stomach, one arm at her side and the other pulled in, her hand curled under her chin.

The scar from the bullet made a slightly jagged line across her bicep. Joss took a deep breath and pulled her elbow up, shielding her face from the light.

John went into the bathroom, changed into a new pair of shorts and went back into the other room, examining the coffee maker until he figured out how to operate it.

Carter finally moved from the bed; she looked through the bags until she found the fruit she'd bought yesterday. She cut a papaya in half, removed the seeds and then wordlessly handed him one half. John stared at it for a moment before deciding to go ahead and eat. It was more breakfast than he usually had.

Joss's morning silence amused John. He wondered what, if anything, could put her in a talkative mood in the morning. Coffee didn't make a difference, he'd noticed, although that didn't make her forego it.

He told her his plans for the day. She nodded in agreement, looking sleepy-eyed as she ate and sipped a cup of coffee. Then she grabbed some clothes and went into the bathroom.

John blinked in surprise when she came back out. She was wearing a skirt—not the straight dark skirt he'd seen her wear on days when she had to testify in court. This skirt had layers of some kind of gauzy material that swirled around her knees. The turquoise color made her brown skin look almost bronze in contrast.

He shifted his thoughts away from Carter's legs. The bright color would work fine with what he had in mind.

John moved the weapons from the mattress to under the floorboards, in case the cleaning staff ignored their _Do Not Disturb _sign. It would have to be a daily ritual, putting items into hiding so that anyone who came in would have a hard time finding anything profitable or interesting.

After they finished choosing various supplies—Carter stuffed hers into a dainty straw handbag, to John's amusement—they went out and caught a taxi. The driver, a garrulous man named Weldon, offered to give them a tour of the city before taking them to their destination. Reese accepted, hoping that more time with the driver might lead to useful information.

Weldon had short black hair, dark brown skin and an easy-to-notice smile, because he smiled a lot. He smiled a lot at Carter in particular.

They passed through the northern half first, then south of the bridge. Weldon pointed to historical landmarks, the homes of various friends and family members, and his favorite music clubs—to which he invited Carter.

"You have any trouble with anyone, you tell them that you're friends with Weldon," said the driver. He looked at Joss in the rear-view mirror and smiled. Carter returned the smile and asked him questions about his family and country; Weldon didn't spare any detail of history, telling them about his ancestors who had been brought here from Africa, about them fighting against a Spanish incursion with the Baymen, about someone—a great-grandfather, maybe?—who had worked as a woodcutter, about Weldon's grandmother's cooking and how they had lost the recipe for her conch soup and no one could succeed in duplicating it.

The story onslaught kept going as they left the city and made their way to the Western Highway, driving through the rough interior that John remembered from his last trip here. The landscape wasn't the towering jungle he'd once imagined; instead the trees in the eastern country were short, the vegetation occasionally sparse.

Finally they arrived at the Belize City zoo—a misnomer, considering how far away from the town they were. They stepped out of the taxi, Weldon joining them in front of the zoo entrance to explain what he liked best. Reese glanced at Carter; she was still doing her flirtatious act. John waited for a break in the conversation; when that opportunity came, he said, "I'm looking for an old friend of mine, Weldon." John gave him a carefully casual smile and stood close to Joss. "Emerson Nayar. Do you know him? He was living in Belize City a few years ago."

"Emerson," Weldon repeated. His demeanor shifted away from the loose familiarity. "He moved away." The man gave him an assessing glance and added, "Emerson had many friends."

John wasn't certain how to reply to that, but Weldon clearly expected something. "I'd really like to see him while I'm here," he said, hoping it would be enough for the other man.

Weldon's smile was now completely absent, his expression distant. "Last I heard, Emerson lived in PG. Punta Gorda." Nowhere near Belize City, in other words; PG was at the southern tip of Belize.

Apparently that was Weldon's final word on the topic. He turned toward Joss one last time and handed her a slip of paper; Reese assumed it was a card or phone number. "Enjoy your visit to the zoo," he said, making no pretense to include John in that final wish. To Reese's surprise, Weldon didn't offer to drive them back to town. Instead he climbed into his taxi and drove off before they walked the rest of the way to the zoo entrance.

It was as he remembered from before: the tiny size, the hand-carved wooden signs that included requests for extra donations to help the staff with their rescue mission.

The zoo visit and his own plan went as he'd projected. They started their walk through the zoo, Carter reacting effusively to the animals, hopefully deflecting anyone's attention from him with her lively expressions and colorful clothing. Eventually John walked away casually, as if to find a restroom. Instead he slipped through an empty employees-only area and made his way to the area west of the zoo, where a few streets had been constructed years ago and then abandoned. John didn't know if they were part of an unfinished project or part of the first zoo site.

He found his stash within a few minutes, unearthed it, stuffed the useful contents into the pockets of his cargo shorts and returned to the zoo. _One of the few easy things this entire trip_, he thought. Nice to get a break for once.

Carter stood in front of the enclosure for the boa, eyes wide as she stared at the zookeeper holding the snake.

"Would you like to hold it next?" the zookeeper asked, gesturing towards Carter.

"You couldn't pay me enough," she said; her adverse reaction was what the man expected, judging by his grin. A teenage boy volunteered to try it, flinching in spite of his apparent interest as he took the snake in his arms.

Carter briefly laced her arm with his as they followed the signs for the harpy eagle exhibit.

"Having a good day yet?" she asked.

"Yes."

That was enough to satisfy her for now; she didn't demand details and they walked up to see the eagle.

The driver for their return trip to Belize City didn't make any flirtatious overtures toward Joss; instead he stayed silent most of the trip and then suddenly offered to sell them some "high quality coke—best you've ever had."

Reese politely refused and used the moment to hint that they were after different potentially illegal products, at which point the driver gave him a blank look and said, "You like heroin? I got heroin too."

Carter tried to hide her reaction to the exchange—a cross between amused and horrified, from what John could see.

It was late enough in the day to have dinner; while the zoo visit had only taken a couple of hours, the drive added another hour each way, plus the city tour with Weldon on the outbound leg. Carter looked pleased to try some local cuisine instead of Indian or Chinese food.

When they got back to their hotel room she grilled him about what supplies he'd pulled out of his stash: a few gold coins and uncut diamonds, a stack of medium to large bills of various currencies. Plus a Canadian passport with his photo and a credit card with the same name. It was probably unusable after three years. John hid most of it in the floorboard and divided the rest into various bags, including Carter's straw handbag.

John went out alone again, leaving Joss glaring at him over the paperback book she'd borrowed from the hotel lobby. He tried gently probing for information at a few bars, then later tried throwing a few punches, gaining grazed knuckles grazed and a bruised shoulder for his efforts. No one wanted to spill any names, at least not to him.

Finally he returned to the hotel. Even after the scuffle he felt emotionally on edge, with no way to vent that anger. Carter had fallen asleep in the large chair with the book in her lap; she woke up as he came in the room.

"Any news?" she asked, and then immediately followed that with, "Never mind," noticing the expression on his face. He walked into the bathroom and turned on the shower just for the noise. After standing there staring for a few minutes he undressed and climbed in. The scrapes stung under the water; he ignored that as well as the bruises forming along his side.

When he came back out of the bathroom, Carter was stretched out on the bed, book in hand again. "I'm not going to force you to talk, you know," she said, looking at him like he was a time bomb.

He didn't answer. After pulling the sheets back on his side, he moved onto the bed and stared at the ceiling. Carter shrugged and read for a few more minutes, finally turning off the bedside lamp. It took her more time than last night, but eventually he could tell she was asleep from her even breathing.

He couldn't sleep so he finally moved to the larger of the two chairs; not quite large enough to be called a loveseat, but it was wide and comfortable. Sitting up suited his bleak mood better anyway. Carter didn't deserve the troubles they were having. His failings in that regard were a constant irritant now.

He also felt an irrational jealousy over her flirtation; it was asinine and he knew it, but the resentment lingered anyway.

At some point he fell asleep, waking up shortly before dawn. Carter was beginning to stir, a frown crossing her face after she woke up enough to see him sitting in the chair.

Their plan today was to go out and try to create the image of rich—but not too rich—tourists who weren't too choosy about how they could continue their cash flow. In the afternoon they split up; Carter went south of the swing bridge, presumably to see if Weldon the taxi driver would be more willing to share information without Reese around.

John went to see the Belize City contact for Molinero's group; he'd been hoping to find a cobbler without involving the transportation people, but as time passed without results, his feelings of desperation grew.

He'd once told Jessica that they were all alone in the end. But he had to recognize how much he'd gotten from others while working—from his fellow Rangers in the Army, from partners like Stanton and from the Agency's vast array of intelligence-gathering. Then Finch, even Fusco and Carter: he owed them his life and the lives of the people they'd helped save.

Molinero's crew didn't have a ready contact; their primary interest was moving cargo, but they promised to look for information. That was the best John could do for the moment; he texted Carter to meet him back at the hotel room and they would go find dinner.

She was already there by the time he arrived. Apparently she hadn't had any luck finding information either; throughout dinner at an Indian restaurant, she seemed distracted and moody, giving him short answers to his questions and letting minutes go by in silence.

It was after their return to the hotel room that he realized her apparent bleak mood stemmed from nervousness rather than irritation. They had started what was becoming a routine: Carter reading another paperback novel from the hotel lobby, Reese leaning forward to the coffee table and cleaning a weapon.

For the moment Joss was looking at him over her book rather than reading; her feet were swinging back and forth just above the floor.

Suddenly she stopped the restless movement and asked, "Do you want to have sex?"


	6. Chapter 6

Jim Caviezel with his natural beard - rather than a fake beard for TV/movies - is still ridiculously good-looking. The beards he's worn for PoI aren't nearly as flattering, so if that's your only mental image, trust me: it's better than that.

* * *

He wasn't sure he'd heard her correctly. "What did you...?" He stopped before finishing the question, in case he'd been completely wrong.

She pressed her lips together before repeating herself. "Do you want to have sex?"

Since his unpremeditated kiss in the back of the van, she hadn't given him any open indication of interest. He'd known they shared a mutual attraction since—well, since they started working together—but he counted on her to be measured and controlled, not impulsive. That was his role.

So he dutifully asked the usual question: "Are you sure?"

In response she raised an eyebrow and pulled out a handful of condoms from her straw bag.

He leaned back in the chair, leaving the pistol on the table. Knowing that she had planned this left him feeling giddy with relief. John knew he should say no to this—it was a spectacularly bad idea, but he was going ahead anyway.

"When did you buy those?" he asked, trying not to grin.

"Our first day here."

"You've been planning to seduce me?"

"Thinking about it, yeah."

"Anything you want in particular?" If Carter could be direct in asking for sex, he could reciprocate.

She looked unsure, uncharacteristically vulnerable—he wondered if she hadn't thought past the initial question, or if she was just surprised at being asked. Finally she said, "No one gets naked alone."

He half-smiled. "Parity. A shirt for a shirt."

"Right."

John thought about what it would take to decrease her nervousness. "And if I volunteer to go first?"

Her dimple briefly appeared. "That would be acceptable."

Pulling the polo shirt he'd been wearing over his head, he felt awkwardly self-aware as he walked the few steps to stand in front of her chair. She dropped the paperback book she'd been holding. He took her hands and placed them on his chest.

Carter stood up, glancing at his face and then back at his chest; he watched as her fingers traced his skin. The awkwardness faded slightly, her touch a comfort, like water after a trek in the desert. He'd wanted this for so long—longer than he was willing to admit.

She touched the bruises along his side from the scuffle yesterday, then moved her hands lower, touching the two bullet scars across his abdomen: one from Snow's man on the roof, one from Stanton when she'd followed Snow's directive.

Joss made a quiet noise in the back of her throat as she looked at the scars. Not her fault, he thought, though he didn't say the words. Then her hands moved upward again, finding scars left by knives and burns, the bullet wound in his shoulder from when Judge Gates' son was kidnapped.

Abruptly she slid her arms around him in a hug. "God, John," she said, her breath warm across his bare chest. Her hands clutched at his back. "I'm glad you're alive."

He blinked at the surge of emotion her words brought. They stood there unmoving in the quiet room. Finally he tilted her head upward and let his lips slide gently against hers, undemanding.

The sweetness of that moment slowly dissolved into something more immediate. Her mouth was hot and wet under his; her fingers tightened their grip on his shoulders to give her leverage against the height difference. John put his hands on the small of her back and moved them up her spine to the base of her neck. Cradling the back of her head in his hands, he let his fingers stroke the soft skin there.

With her right hand she rubbed her fingertips across muscles and sinews, from his shoulder to his throat, finally touching where his pulse throbbed in his neck, light and quick.

He pulled his mouth away from hers. "Feel what you do?" he whispered.

She gave him a distracted smile, lashes fluttering as she looked at his chest again, using the break in kissing to draw her hands down from his shoulders to his torso. This time she traced the planes and muscles rather than examining his scars. Her small hands looked delicate against his skin. It was seductive, watching her give his body the same focused attention he had seen her give her work.

He wanted to touch her the same way. "Maybe a little tit for tat now?"

She rolled her eyes and made a face at his suggestion. "You don't have to take the James Bond act that far."

"James Bond?"

"You don't remember the terrible puns he made? Always about sex, too." Her hands dropped from his chest and started unbuttoning her shirt from the bottom; he worked on the top buttons at the same time.

He helped her pull the shirt from her shoulders and remove her plain white bra. For a second fantasy and reality clashed. While John hadn't actively tried to invent scenarios with Carter as his sex partner, those thoughts and images had popped in his mind, unbidden, many times in the past few weeks.

No, even longer than that, he had to admit. At any rate, she'd been right about him; he was—or had been—a romantic. Not in the sense of idealism, like her, but in the ways he'd imagined sex with her. He wasn't sure she even owned a slinky dress, and the lingerie he'd seen so far on this trip was strictly functional.

Instead of a siren's sultry words and attitude, he had her uncertainly-offered trust. John didn't want to ruin that—not the sex, although he didn't want to mess that up either. But her confidence in him mattered.

Even without declarations, lingerie and seductress moves, he found himself wrapped up in her: the way her smile slowly appeared as he palmed the heavy weight of her breasts, the warm feel of her fingertips brushing his waist as she started to undo his shorts, the noise from the back of her throat as he kissed her again.

When they were both undressed he stared at her, thinking that she almost looked like a comic book drawing of a woman: full breasts, lush hips, her shapely ass and legs. He doubted that statement would go over well with her. Instead he offered to carry her the few remaining steps to the bed, which made her laugh and shake her head.

She walked there on her own, throwing a tiny smile back over her shoulder before she sat on the mattress. He didn't hesitate to join her. The woman lying with him offered a mixture of boldness and hesitation—an unusual combination on Carter, who was normally so sure. He noted all of the contrasts: the curved fullness of her breasts against his slim fingers, the velvety smoothness of her stomach against his wiry forearm, the soft luster of her skin against flat cotton sheets.

He wanted to see her face, remember every expression, to know that she chose him for a little while. She watched him as well, like she was studying him. It was awkward and overwhelmingly intimate and exhilarating, their eyes meeting as her thighs gripped around his hips; a mathematical formulation of skin to skin, the geometry of planes and angles, a line formed by glances until her eyes slid shut and she gasped out his name. Joss arched her back, eyes still closed, her muscles tightening around him. That was when he lost himself as well, as all the colors and sounds and textures blended together.

When the world took shape and form again, he pulled out of her, disposing of the condom in the trash can. Joss took a deep breath but didn't open her eyes. "Come back here," she whispered, and he did, lying next to her and curling up so that their bodies were turned toward each other.

She opened her eyes long enough to lace the fingers of her right hand with his left. They stayed that way for a long time, listening to the muffled sounds of the air conditioner struggling to keep the room cool.

Sometime later Joss sighed and got up from the bed, walking into the bathroom. He had wondered how long she could wait before starting her nightly routine; she wasn't the kind of person who would skip those steps. After listening to her brush her teeth, John joined her in there, watching as she frowned at her face in the mirror.

"What?" he asked her.

"Beard burn," she said, gently poking at the skin near her mouth.

"Sorry about that."

She turned around and lightly swatted him on the ass. "It's really not that bad," she admitted. "Maybe because it's been, what, a week since you last shaved?"

He'd lost track of that since they got here. Four days here, three days on the boat; it added up.

"Not as prickly when it's longer," she said, and cradled his chin in her hands.

* * *

Apparently having sex removed that subconscious barrier from Joss's mind that kept her on her half of the bed. When he woke up, her back was pressed against his chest; her legs were curled up at the same angle as his, like she'd always been sleeping as the little spoon to his big spoon.

He lay there, listening to Carter's quiet breathing, relishing the warmth of her body against his. It didn't quiet his fears, however. He'd had sex with other operatives when he'd been with the agency, but never his partners. Telling himself that this was different didn't erase the possibility of similar problems. He'd seen that often enough: missions gone badly awry because partners had trouble with boundaries.

Plus he was afraid of himself—of wanting more than what he could have. She'd always had that effect on him.

In spite of the trepidation he felt, he didn't leave the bed yet. Eventually Carter stirred, rubbing her eyes and turning her head slightly to look at him out of the corner of her eye. She then plopped her head back on the pillow and curled herself into a tighter comma shape, bumping against his morning erection as she did so.

That caught her attention; she stilled and then suddenly pulled away, reaching her arm toward the bedside table and grabbing a condom.

Apparently her regular morning strike against talking didn't mean no sex. She turned toward him, sliding her hands onto his shoulders. He leaned in and kissed her, taking care not to scratch her face.

"Morning breath," she said, her tone teetering between informative and grumpy.

"I don't care," he told her, and kissed her again.

If last night was about offering her comfort, this morning's theme was exploration. Joss was still very capable of communicating even in her mostly non-verbal morning state. By the time she tore the wrapper on the condom and rolled it onto him, John felt utterly smug.

He wondered if she would be more talkative afterward. She wasn't; she closed her eyes again, limp and sated. John wished he could sleep that easily. He wished she would stay awake, so he could tease her about using him, or just to see her dark eyes open and looking at him. He wanted to lie in bed next to her and fall asleep listening to her breathing.

Instead he got up and showered. By the time he was out of the bathroom, she was awake again; the coffeemaker was brewing, and she was slicing up a papaya.

"Same plan for today as yesterday?" she asked him.

"Pretty much." No point in going to talk to Molinero's men again; they'd asked him to give them time to find useful information. He wouldn't risk their potential ride back to the US with scare tactics when he could wait another day.

Like yesterday, they tried to give the impression of a rich couple looking for certain kinds of trouble. The touches and glances that had felt so calculated and distant before had a new layer today. John struggled to stay focused while they were out together; this was exacerbated by the quietness of the city. To their surprise, most businesses in Belize City were closed on Sunday, making it difficult to find anything to do.

They separated shortly after lunch. Reese walked around the Marine Terminal; people there were still working. Then he took a taxi to the suburbs, looking for open bars. Not wanting to face Carter's reaction to new bruises, he avoided getting into any fights this time. Neither undertaking gave any useful results so he texted Joss to meet him back at the hotel room for dinner.

She didn't reply to his last message and she wasn't in the room when he got there. Reese normally wouldn't worry—or so he told himself—but it was getting dark, and they'd been cultivating an image of wealth in a city known for its poverty and high crime levels. He paced the room, checked the windows and finally started taking apart the SIG for something to do.

When Carter finally showed up, she had a hint of a smile on her face. John bit back the demanding questions he'd been ready to throw at her and waited for her to tell him what happened.

She put down the straw handbag on the coffee table, taking out her Glock. "I might have a lead on a contact." Glancing at the scrapes still visible on one of his knuckles, she added, "And I didn't even have to beat anyone up to get it."

Normally he might smile at her banter, but he wasn't yet over the anxiety he'd felt waiting for her to arrive. Instead he settled on learning more about her potential lead.

To his bemused appreciation, all of her paperback book reading had been part of a daily series of conversations with the afternoon desk clerk. "Her name's Gladys," said Carter, "and she thinks I'm too good for my new boyfriend." Her eyes gleamed as she told him that, holding back her laughter.

"Oh, and if you want to know what finally sold her on the idea that we're a couple? It was housekeeping." Before they'd gone out this morning Carter had removed the _Do Not Disturb _sign from the door.

"So the maids gossip to the desk clerk," he concluded.

"Oh, yes. Every day."

Well, at least they'd finally given the staff something to talk about, then. "So how did you get her to tell you a contact for fake papers?"

She pointed at him. "Rich Canadian boyfriend." Pointing at herself, she said, "Girlfriend with minor conviction on her record that prevents her from getting Canadian citizenship."

"The course of true love never did run smooth," he quoted, watching her eyes crinkle at the corners.

She nodded. "Nothing works as well as a good sob story. Even if it's not particularly plausible. Anyway, Gladys has an appointment for us to meet with the woman tomorrow morning."

"You got all that out of the desk clerk," he said. The same one who barely said a word to them when they checked in.

Her dimples peeked out, although she was trying to hide her satisfaction. "Well, we'll see if it pans out tomorrow. Oh, and Gladys said to watch out that we don't get jacked, since you're rich."

Gladys the taciturn clerk was giving Carter contact information and advice now. Amazing.

She grabbed his arm and pulled him toward the door again. "Come on, I'm starving."

* * *

The cobbler's name was Sonia. First name only—and presumably a false name at that, though Reese didn't know for sure. She was at least sixty years old, with jet-black hair and an unidentifiable accent; it didn't have the Belizean Kriol sound. Her large round glasses reminded Reese of an insect—a red-lipped insect, because her thin lips were generously coated with a layer of bright color.

Her set-up included a non-networked computer and printer; one employee who worked as photographer and bodyguard; and a large iguana with a cage, living in the corner under a heat lamp. Not that it was needed here. Sonia preferred warmer temperatures, based on how hot it was in the room.

"What do you want done with the pictures?" asked Sonia after her unnamed assistant took their photos against a plain backdrop.

He looked at Carter; she widened her eyes and raised one shoulder, as if to say, _You're supposed to know this stuff, not me._

"Make my beard longer and darker," he suggested. The darker color would give the impression that the photo had been taken a few years ago. "Also, move the eyes a bit closer together and lower the ears slightly."

Sonia nodded, taking hand-written notes as he spoke.

"And for her—slightly smaller eyes and a longer nose." Now Carter's expression clearly read, _What the hell? _He gave her an apologetic shrug. Everyone knew how unflattering ID pictures could be; hopefully the slight changes would make enough of a difference that the Machine wouldn't identify their photos with facial recognition software.

"Good. If you want to approve the photo changes, you come back this afternoon at four. Otherwise you come tomorrow morning to pick up the final copies." Sonia's tone was final; the unnamed assistant showed them to the door.

They walked through part of the city in upbeat silence. Carter was practicing walking slower, which made John do the same; theoretically useful but frustrating. He preferred his purposeful walk, but in case the Machine had access to gait recognition, he had to modify that.

Carter was wearing the turquoise skirt again; her knees peeped in and out of view as she walked. Walking slowly had some perks, he mused, glancing at her legs.

As they walked toward the taxi stand she pulled out her cell phone and tapped a few keys. He wondered what she was doing, and then his phone buzzed. A message from her—she'd sent him a text that read simply, _Yay_.

John hadn't expected her to be so comically spontaneous and warm. He should have remembered the likelihood of an increased emotional attachment, but he hadn't been thinking beyond his own feelings and desire when he'd said yes.

She wouldn't show the same affection and openness later, of course. He would weather the fall-out when Joss realized that her feelings stemmed from the situation rather than a lasting connection. John didn't need to know about her dating history to know that he was nothing like the type of man she would normally choose.

What concerned John was that he hadn't needed to fake a connection to her—hadn't needed to act like sex with her was more than just fucking a warm body for the sake of fucking, or only for her comfort, because for him it never had been.

He'd let go once before and survived it, believing that he had a mission that was more important. He could do it again. (No point in dwelling on what would happen when he didn't have a job to do. John had spent enough time leaning over the edge of that abyss; he was still here, it was still there, and he wouldn't think about it until it loomed in front of him again.)

As soon as they got back to room, she kissed him. "Progress," she said, her tone almost giddy. It was disconcerting and delightful to see her with this level of optimism.

"Thanks to you," he told her.

She slipped off her sandals, holding onto his arm for balance. Glancing up at him, she said, "I deserve a reward."

"Is that so?"

She nodded and steered him toward the big chair to have a seat. He wondered what she was going to do, but didn't have to wait long to find out. Joss sat across his legs, her knees on each side of his hips, the tops of her feet hanging off the back of the chair. Her turquoise skirt slid partway up her thighs. She leaned in and kissed him with enthusiasm, angling him the way she wanted by holding onto both sides of his head.

After a couple of minutes she leaned back and pulled her shirt over her head, kissed him again and then took off her bra. She took his hands and placed them on the lower curves of her breasts and pushed upward slightly, wiggling slightly in his lap when he continued pressing after her arms dropped to her sides.

John liked seeing this side of her: confidently amorous. She gripped his shoulders while he cupped her breasts and lightly rubbed his thumbs across her nipples.

Joss slid her hands along the tendons of his neck, then up to his mouth, tracing his lower lip with her index finger.

"You're distracting me," he teased her, watching the way her mouth curved up at the corners at his words. "I think you should let me do the work right now. Your reward, remember?"

She huffed out a laugh. "So I'm supposed to act like a statue now?"

He leaned in and whispered, "Put your hands behind your head." She shuddered as his lips brushed her ear.

It took her a moment before the meaning of the words sank in. "What?" she asked, looking suspicious.

"Do you trust me?"

"Yes." No hesitation, no comic faces or joking around.

"Well..." he said, raising his eyebrows.

She did it, lacing her fingers behind her head. Her expression revealed both annoyance and arousal. He admired the view, her breasts pushed forward by the pose. "No touching," he ordered.

He wanted her to wait and feel the mounting desire he'd kept under control for so long. John traced the line from the base of her throat to below her navel, using the tip of his index finger. She tilted her head slightly to the side, but didn't say anything. Moving his hands to the underside of her biceps, he examined the shape of the muscles there. When she inhaled quickly, he asked, "Does that hurt?"

"Hurt?" She blinked in surprise. "No, John, it doesn't hurt."

His fingers skimmed down from her arms to the sides of her breasts. From there he traced the round curves and slowly made his way toward the centers, watching her nipples pucker as he moved his hands ever closer without touching the tips.

"John," she said, her voice husky and impatient. He leaned forward and captured one of them with his mouth, listening with satisfaction at the humming noise she made.

Eventually he moved his mouth to her throat. She let out a squeak and wriggled in his lap again when he licked and nibbled at her ear. After bumping her arm during that move, she put her hands back on his shoulders but didn't try to control his actions like she had earlier.

Kissing her throat again, he moved his left hand to her thigh. He could feel the ridged scar tissue from the injury she'd gotten in Iraq. Slowly he pushed up her skirt and then pulled his head back and gave her an inquisitive look. She nodded; he cupped her through her panties and then slid his fingers under the elastic.

She was slick and warm where he pressed his fingers into her. Her eyelashes curled against her cheekbones as she closed her eyes. "Like that," she said as he moved his thumb through the tight curls. Her hands clutched at his shoulders, gripping and releasing.

He let her quick breathing and gasps guide his movements; her fingers pressed harder into his shoulders as she rocked against his hand. When he thought she was close, he leaned forward. "You can let go now," he said, letting the breath from his whispered words touch the skin of her ear. Her body clenched around his fingers and she leaned forward against his chest as the tremors ended.

Her breasts were plastered against his shirt; her head tilted on his shoulders, mouth close to his neck. "That was a good reward," she finally said. "Too bad we weren't doing this when I found that apartment in Houston."

He traced her spine with his right hand, enjoying the curve and warmth of her body against his. "No retroactive recompense," he told her.

She laughed at that, leaning back for a moment and letting out a chuckle that made her breasts bounce and her eyes close in merriment. It was the most open laughter he'd seen from her. The turquoise skirt was rucked up around her waist now, barely covering her from view. John admired the way her warm brown skin glowed against the bright color.

Joss put her hands on his chest when she finished giggling. "You should get those clothes off," she told him.

"You think so?"

"I could help," she offered with a cheeky grin. She started tugging at his shirt to untuck it; the shirttail, pressed against the chair behind him, didn't come loose. John enjoyed the frustrated expression on her face for a moment before sliding his hands under her ass and standing up, then letting her feet slide to the ground.

"Show-off," she muttered. Her hands went back to his shirt again, pulling it loose and then trying to yank it over his head. She wasn't tall enough to do it without his cooperation; he finally relented and undressed the rest of the way, looking at her watching him take off his clothes.

The turquoise skirt still covered the top half of her legs, making him think of a ballet dancer wearing a leotard and dance skirt. Leotards didn't reveal full breasts and dark nipples, though. "Nice view," he told her.

She gave him an inquisitive look and then realized that she was still partly clothed. John thought about telling her to leave the skirt on, but decided against it. Joss made quick work of removing it.

Walking over to the bed, he sat on the edge of it, waiting until she came close enough for him to grab. He moved her between his legs and fell back, pulling her on top of him and then watching the expressions shift across her face.

"You're gonna make me do all the work this time?" she asked.

"It could be fun," he said with a deadpan expression. She laughed and moved in, aggressive and sure.


	7. Chapter 7

"We're going back there at four," she told him. John was lying on his back, hands behind his head as he looked up at Joss. She sat next to him, her legs pulled up and crossed at the ankles; her knees blocked his view of her breasts. Like a study of a nude for an art class, John thought, or a statue carved out of wood.

"You're going to hate the photos anyway." His unstated question was _so why bother looking at them in advance?_

"I just need to know."

He watched her twist her mouth, a rueful acknowledgment that it was more a question of vanity than importance to the mission.

She leaned forward slightly, touching the skin at his hip. Her hand traced the ridge of bone there, fingers sliding across it.

If she moved her hand higher, she would find the scars on his abdomen; lower, and she could touch the scar on his thigh. Snow's rooftop sniper had done his best to disable John without taking the kill shot. Someone hadn't necessarily wanted him dead right away.

"Why did you let me go?" he asked, surprising himself by verbalizing the question that had haunted him for months now. He'd let himself get pulled in by the intimacy of this moment.

"What?"

"Why did you let me go in the parking garage? Was it Finch?" That was his only guess—that somehow seeing Finch there with him had made a difference to Joss.

She frowned. "Partly it was him, but..." Sighing, she said, "Hell, it was a dozen different things, including the fact that I didn't even want to call Snow in the first place." She turned and looked him in the eyes. "You shot out the headlights. You didn't take out the shooter or Snow or me. Just the headlights. And then when I caught up with you, you had this look on your face. Like you wanted to tell me to be nice to the little guy and that it was okay if you bled to death while I tried to arrest you."

She looked away and blinked quickly a couple of times.

Finch hadn't listened when he told him to stay away. John remembered that moment in the parking garage, worried that Harold would get in trouble as well. Feeling his own blood drip down his stomach and leg, knowing he was going into shock. Seeing Carter's face, the stupefaction of having her arms supporting him for a moment before he half-fell into the back seat of Finch's car.

Joss's fingers were still on his hip. She looked at him and then looked down, a tiny expression of surprise crossing her face as she did so.

Surprise indeed. For a moment he pictured this from her perspective—she was in bed with him, naked, talking about a progression of events that had started with him stinking of whiskey and refusing to give her a name.

* * *

Tuesday afternoon. Carter was flipping through the pages of her new passport again when John came back to the hotel room. They hadn't had much choice about aliases for the papers, since they had opted to get credit cards as well. That kind of work took time; Sonia was a savvy entrepreneur and created accounts in advance, but the names she'd chosen weren't ordinary enough, in John's opinion.

Carter had laughed when she'd realized he hadn't picked out the common theme among the names: apparently they were all characters from Disney movies. She minded going by Aurora far less than he minded using the name Sebastian.

"We leave tomorrow morning," he told her. He'd been talking to Molinero's local crew. Now that they had the documents in hand, he knew she was impatient to get back to the US.

She picked up an Illinois driver's license with his photo from the small stack on the bed. "That's quick," she said, glancing at him as she spoke.

"They're busy men," he answered. Busy delivering drugs and he didn't know what else to Miami; Reese wasn't going to ask, and neither was Carter, even though she would hate having any tie to it.

"We'll be able to do a lot more now," he added, indicating the IDs and credit cards.

She nodded and then gave him a look that was his only forewarning for her statement. "You know we're going to have to split up when we get back."

He knew nothing of the sort.

"We're too recognizable together," she said when he didn't respond. "Whether it's the Machine or people, both of us in one place is a pattern."

He closed his eyes; this was something that he didn't want to face. And if he let her go... John pressed hard against the irrational fears that edged to the surface. Joss wasn't like Jessica; she wasn't blithely going off to marry a monster disguised as a man.

"We work better together," he said, rallying an argument to her blunt statement. They had different strengths, something he'd appreciated since she had first agreed to work with him and Finch.

"Yeah, but that's useless if all we do is run. And we have the secure phones, so it's not like we'll be completely out of contact."

John took two steps back and sat on the big chair. "It's not just sharing ideas. It's security and protection—basic survival."

"We can survive on our own," she said. _I can survive without you _was what she meant. "Don't mistake what I'm saying. I'd rather stay together, but we have a goal to accomplish."

She was right about goals. He had his goal of speaking with Finch—face to face now, because her distrust of the man had revived the concerns that John had stifled. Letting Carter go would allow him to accomplish that. He could trust Carter to take care of herself for that time, then go find her again afterwards.

He looked down and blinked. "Are you sure you wouldn't rather go live in the jungle or on a mountaintop somewhere? I could go get Taylor and bring him to you."

The question was half-joking, half-hopeful. From her wistful expression, she recognized that. "I've got some windmills to go tilt at," she said, attempting a comical tone but not quite succeeding.

"I guess that leaves me with the role of Sancho Panza." He watched the small smile cross her face.

"We'll let Fusco do that," she told him.

* * *

"Do we have ammo for the Smith and Wesson?" she asked, rifling through her duffel bag.

"Getting it now," he told her. He was prying up the floorboards for the last time. Packing tonight; they would be leaving the hotel before the sun came up.

Left to himself, he might have simply gotten up early and packed then. Carter had her moments of spontaneity, but apparently trip-planning wasn't one of those times. He had to admit that they'd both acquired more stuff than he'd realized during their week here. In spite of that, they'd still made a quick excursion to buy a few more supplies after dinner.

Reese pulled out the disassembled Heckler & Koch SP89. They discussed how to divide the weapons; mostly Reese listened to Carter question herself over what she would use. He figured she should take whatever she wanted—and the sub-machine gun—and he would pack what was left.

Carter frowned at his insistence about the Heckler & Koch, but when he held out the pieces, she took them from him, placing them underneath the small pile of folded clothes already in her duffel bag.

The turquoise skirt wasn't in there; he'd noticed it in the discard pile earlier. He was done dictating to her what he wanted her to take now that the weapons were sorted. The abandoned skirt was another reminder that their time here had been an interlude, a temporary respite.

John finished packing long before Carter was done. Watching her pack and repack her duffel bag, he caught himself holding back a chuckle at her indecision. After she finally stowed her bag under the bed, she went into the bathroom.

He undressed while she was in there, putting his shirt in the discard pile and the shorts on top of his bag. They'd both slept nude since they started having sex; he'd told himself that it worked as part of their cover story, but he liked the skin to skin contact, touching the curves she hid under those vests for work, knowing that she was allowing herself to be vulnerable with him.

He'd indulged himself, let himself get distracted from their primary purpose while they were here, told himself that the sex and comfort and familiarity were for her. The truth was that he wanted it—wanted her humor and passion and protectiveness. Wanted her to look at him like he was more than a colleague. It was nothing he deserved, but he'd tried to take it anyway.

She started it, but he'd said yes, he'd let it go on. Starting tomorrow the hiatus would end.

John sat in the middle of the bed, legs stretched in front of him, hands flattened on the sheet just behind him to support his weight. Eyes closed, he listened as Carter she walked back into the room.

His thoughts turned to what needed to happen when they returned to the US. It was important to keep a strong relationship between the two of them. They had a common goal; he shouldn't do anything that would make it more difficult for her to work with him in the future.

The sound of fabric rustling—she was undressing now. The mattress shifted as she sat on the bed. He could feel her watching him.

Apparently she didn't have the patience for his silence. After a few moments she muttered something that sounded like _idiot_. He didn't know if she was addressing him or herself, but he felt the mattress shift slightly and then her legs were draped across his, her head pressed to his torso.

"What are you thinking about?" she asked.

"Nothing."

Rubbing her cheek against his chest, she made a scoffing noise. You, he wanted to say. Thinking about you.

John wrapped his arms around her. He wanted her to miss him, to think about him when he was gone. It was pragmatic, he told himself, to make this last evening memorable, to ensure that any bond she might feel wouldn't fade right away. (Pragmatic should have said no four days ago.)

It was pragmatic to leave her lips swollen with friction, logical to pin her hands over her head and wait until she was cursing and almost sobbing before pushing into her.

Sensible to encourage her to mark him, to drag her nails down his sides, to nip and suck at his skin, to leave him growling at her urgency.

He'd wanted her wrecked but he felt like he'd been washed to shore as well, clinging to her.

When his heart rate returned to normal, he watched her as she traced a line on her breast, lightly touching the abrasion by his beard. Glancing at him, she leaned over and did the same to him, trailing her fingers down the marks she'd left on his skin.

Finally she laid next to him, curling her back against his side. He turned and copied her curved form; she reached back, took his hand and pulled until his arm was draped across her waist.

John fell asleep before she did, fighting it briefly before letting himself drift.

* * *

The next morning he watched as Carter sliced a papaya in silence, watched her eyes at half-mast as she chewed.

It was their last morning in Belize; he thought about saying something about the moment, about leaving. Instead he watched as she went about her morning routine.

Before they left the room he looked around one last time. The turquoise skirt wasn't in the discard pile anymore, he noticed. Maybe you'll see it again, he thought, and then made himself shut down that line of thinking.

The sun was still edging over the horizon as they left Belize City on Molinero's boat. They headed northeast; John watched as the water shifted from brown to tan and finally back to the clear blue of the Caribbean coast.

They went back to alternating sleeping schedules. Molinero's crew was friendly but Reese wasn't going to trust a group of drug smugglers just because they were likable. During their shared waking hours he and Carter alternated between sitting in their corner of the cargo hold to talk in private—as private as they could get, anyway—or standing on deck watching the horizon.

When they were both awake in their shared space, they worked on memorizing their new ID information and inventing cover stories for them. They also made multiple plans for staying in contact once they got back to the US: times to use the phones he'd stolen from the base, rendezvous points in case of emergency, codes to use in text messages.

The code list was purposely short, to make it easier to memorize. As she stared at their notepad with the proposed codes, Carter took the pen from him and added one more, writing **55 **on the page.

"Fifty-five?" He raised his eyebrows.

"It means stay safe," she said.

He blinked once, slowly. "Okay."

Carter shot him a slightly derisive look, as if to question why they _wouldn't _have such a code.

They didn't have that much time to plan together; the return trip was shorter thanks to a stronger motor and more direct route.

When she stood on deck it looked to John like Carter was trying to will the boat to go even faster. He didn't have the same feeling of urgency; as soon as they arrived they risked being back in the Machine's sights. Belize City wasn't a safe haven, but compared to the risks they would face again, it seemed like a refuge.

He didn't tell her his plan to talk to Finch. Maybe she guessed and didn't say anything, maybe she hadn't even considered the possibility. Either way, it was one more thing unspoken between them.

After docking in Miami again they wrapped things up quickly, going to the stash they'd left here and dividing up the tech equipment they'd acquired before.

No lingering; Carter was ready to leave Florida. She put her hand on his cheek and kissed him, her lips lightly brushing against his. "Fifty-five," she said, giving him a small teasing grin.

He almost couldn't bear to watch her walk away. All of the things he'd told himself about her ability to keep herself safe sounded hollow. The Machine had eyes everywhere. It was all he could do to keep from running after her.

Instead he moved deliberately—that damned slow walk—and found a car to steal for himself. He didn't take a break until he'd made it halfway up the east coast, into North Carolina.

* * *

"We need to talk." Apparently Harold had gotten the military phone Reese had sent him through the mail—and kept it in close proximity. Those were the only words John said after he dialed the number and heard Finch's voice. After ending it, John made his way to the bench under the bridge.

They'd had a few emergency plans in place before; John deliberately didn't use any of their codes, since all of those conversations took place either via cell phone or with a cell phone in range. He knew Finch would figure out fairly quickly where to meet him. Where else would they go? This place marked the beginning. It was where Finch demonstrated his continued faith in John by giving him the address of the apartment.

Using the encrypted phone was the only security measure John could take. The Machine predicted human behavior with alarming accuracy; it might guess why Finch was going to that empty stretch of land under the bridge. That was a risk John had to take, though.

Reese made it there first, as he'd planned. As Finch walked toward him, John held out his cell phone, showing the darkened screen. "Is yours turned off?" he asked.

Finch nodded. "I left it in the car," he said. "Though it's not really necessary anymore." The man looked tired, his pale eyes bloodshot. Instead of the flashes of intricate design Reese had appreciated, Finch's tie was a plain blue-gray; no waistcoat or pocket square today either.

Harold's piercing glance made John feel very aware of how things had been the last time he'd been here with a beard. At least this one was neatly trimmed. His clothes, while clean, didn't have the elegance of his usual suit. (Not even fit for an assassin, much less a banker, thought Reese, remembering Finch's comments as he'd altered John's suit.)

Apparently John passed muster well enough anyway, because the first question Finch asked after they both sat on the bench was, "Is Detective Carter okay?"

John nodded. "She's fine." He'd checked with her shortly before making the call to Finch.

"Oh, thank God," said Finch, his body language relaxing. "When I realized what was happening, I—" He paused and took a deep breath. "I could never forgive myself if she'd been harmed."

Turning his torso to look at Reese, he said, "I'm so sorry. I didn't know it would do that. That wasn't why I built it."

Reese let his own posture shift. Confirmation: he wasn't sure what emotion he felt, but to know with certainty that it was the Machine changed everything. He closed his eyes briefly, trying to assimilate the new information.

"What happened, Harold?" he finally asked.

Finch sighed and started talking. "When that woman had me, she—she congratulated me on the Machine's defenses. I assumed she meant the way it fed information to different agencies anonymously. That's what I told myself anyway. I didn't want to think of any other possibility."

This had to be part of the reason why Finch had refused to talk about his captivity with Root; he'd been in denial over things he'd learned from her.

Pulling himself up a little straighter, Finch said, "Before you disappeared, I listened in on your conversation when Detective Carter mentioned knowing about Grace." John's cell phone had been in his pocket; Carter had expected that it would be enough to prevent anyone from hearing their talk. John had known better, and yet it still surprised him.

Continuing, Harold told him, "I realized that she'd been researching me. And then you cut off contact and I knew something was wrong. So I nudged the back door open a little wider and found a list of names. Some of them I recognized."

Finch turned to look across the water. "They were casual acquaintances who probably did something as innocuous as look for one of my identities on Facebook. And because of that the Machine decided that they were a security risk."

Looking back at John, Finch hesitated for a moment before saying anything else. Finally he said, "I never thought about the Machine deciding that _my _safety was one of its priorities. That simply never occurred to me. But the Machine had even created a list of options for that."

"What were the options?" asked John.

"Monitor, subvert or mitigate."

What did subvert and mitigate mean to the Machine? Finch answered John's unspoken question when he said, "Some of the people on the subvert and mitigate lists were dead." His expression was bleak.

"I tried to alter the programming, but the Machine's defenses wouldn't allow me to change that. Instead I added Detectives Carter and Fusco to the list of assets—level one assets—which allows them access to information about the Machine. And me."

Finch looked at Reese from the corner of his eyes. "Detective Fusco was already on the list of people to monitor."

John wasn't surprised at that. Fusco's research into Finch had been one of the stumbling blocks for Reese in believing that the Machine was responsible for targeting Carter.

"Am I on the list of assets?" asked Reese.

"You are. The Machine never targeted you. Instead you were an acceptable safety risk when the Machine decided that Carter was too dangerous."

It took John a few moments to process some of the information. He tried to guess which events in the US connected to the Machine and which to the FBI's and CIA's ongoing searches for him. The helicopters after his theft at the DSCC—that could go either way. The FBI had plenty of resources, but the Machine could have helped. The Houston apartment break-in was probably a random attempt at a burglary, though.

The drive from Houston to Florida, the phone call to Judge Gates—both accomplished without getting caught. He and Carter had been careful, but that safety might have come from Finch's interference.

He let himself feel a moment of relief at the thought that Carter wasn't in danger from the Machine at this moment. Probably not, at any rate. He'd reevaluate that idea presently.

Other complications mattered more right now. John told Finch, "Calling her an asset doesn't make the other problems just disappear. The FBI still has questions, and Elias's men shot at her."

"I know. I've already started working on that." Finch shifted on the bench again. The hard wooden seat couldn't be comfortable for him, but the man didn't complain. "Detectives Szymanski and La Blanca were able to complete their operation successfully, with a little behind-the-scenes backup."

John speculated on what Finch meant by backup. Maybe the man had hired a private security detail for the police officers, or asked Zoe Morgan to apply pressure somewhere. Whatever it was, Harold didn't share that information. "They chopped off some of the financial tentacles, so Elias's stronghold over certain parts of the city has been lessened." He paused to give Reese a sardonic expression. "The other mobsters have reacted as you might expect when there's blood in the water.

"As for the FBI, I'm still looking for a solution to that. But they never did tell the NYPD that they wanted to talk to Detective Carter, which is a hopeful sign. Their department has been losing personnel to transfers ever since that night." Since Root had taken Finch, in other words. "Plus they appear to be conducting some internal investigations."

Reese looked at Finch, his eyebrows raised.

"I'm fairly certain that Elias's men knew about the NYPD operation because of a leak in the FBI. Someone in their office here gave that information to Elias."

Finch stared at the river and then looked at John. "I can't guarantee anyone's safety," he said, "but she's a homicide detective for the NYPD. She accepted a certain level of risk with the job." The unspoken rebuke was familiar; Finch had made his opinion about Reese's protectiveness of Carter clear in the past.

"Nonetheless, I've tried to smooth the way for Detective Carter's return. Detective Fusco filed the paperwork for emergency family leave for her." Finch had filled in most of those details, Reese was certain. "I doubt her captain is pleased, but the formalities were observed, even if her absence is... somewhat irregular. I also made sure that her bills were paid. When she comes back, she'll still have a lot of questions to answer, but hopefully those difficulties will be surmountable."

After watching Finch adjust his seat yet again, Reese said, "Let's walk by the water." Without waiting for a response, he stood up and waited for Finch to leverage himself up from the bench. They walked toward the river, sunlight reflecting off of the smooth surface, bouncing pockets of light into the shadow created by the bridge. The air here was only slightly cooler than the rest of the city; even Finch, who usually appeared so unflappable and proper, looked bothered by the August heat.

John wasn't sure what to say at first. He knew Carter well enough to understand that she wouldn't come back to the city until the Machine was gone. Not for her own safety, but for everyone else's. And for the laws she was trying to uphold.

After several steps in silence, Reese said, "I appreciate what you've done, but it isn't enough. Teaching the Machine that Carter and Fusco are assets isn't going to keep other people safe from it." He watched Finch out of the corner of his eyes. "Do you even know why some of the names you didn't recognize were on the Machine's list?"

"No, I don't. I could guess about some, but... After I couldn't get the Machine to accept the command to delete the mitigate and subvert options, I tried—well. I tried shutting it down. It wouldn't let me do that, either."

They both stopped walking after that statement, Reese studying the expression on Finch's face.

"I know where it is," Finch finally offered. "I'm not sure how you can get to it, but I can tell you the location."

"Where?"

"Idaho. I have the coordinates."

Reese nodded. Carter had narrowed the probable locations down to three states; Idaho was one of them.

"Tell me about it," said Reese. He needed to know what he was up against.

"I finished work on the Machine in two thousand nine. That was when we allowed the government to take control of it." We—Finch had to be referring to Nathan Ingram with that pronoun.

"Two weeks after shutting it down here in New York, there was a news story about a paramilitary group in Idaho whose leader had made a rambling declaration against the United States government. He had also amassed quite a collection of firearms, which led to the ATF taking an interest in the group."

"I remember," said Reese. Talking heads in the news media had compared the events to what had happened at Ruby Ridge, although this stand-off hadn't escalated to violence. It wasn't even a stand-off in the same sense that Ruby Ridge had been. People came and went, with government agents watching at all times rather than blockading the land. At least, that had been the situation when Reese had last paid attention to it; he'd missed several months of news at various times in the last few years.

Finch nodded. "The time frame made me suspicious. A paramilitary group no one had ever heard of suddenly making declarations and stockpiling weapons? Two weeks after the government took possession of the Machine?"

It took Reese a few moments to start forming the connections Finch had seen three years ago. "So no one can access that terrain—at least not easily." The paramilitary group members would be suspicious and armed, the government agencies involved would be surveilling the area, resulting in land closed off to outsiders, whether casually interested or trying to infiltrate the area.

Reese kept time with Finch's careful steps as they walked along the river. The grassy area running parallel to the Hudson was empty; unsurprising, considering the heat of Manhattan in mid-afternoon.

Finch nodded in agreement with Reese's assessment. "I'm certain that some of the militants are actually government agents. But there are always people willing to go along with radical hate groups. Which means that there are agents inside and outside the compound, true believers, and a plethora of weapons."

He stopped walking and looked at John. "I doubt any of the agents know that the true objective is to protect the Machine. They probably aren't even aware of its existence."

John furrowed his brow. "What's the long-term plan for this? They can't expect to keep up a stand-off, or the pretense of one, forever."

Finch gave him an owlish look through his glasses. "If I were to venture a guess—which you know I hate doing—I would suppose that eventually one of the agencies would raid the compound and the land would become government property by default, tied up in litigation while various lawyers argue over who was at fault."

That would certainly keep the Machine's location well-guarded for years to come. "I'm going to need as much information about the group as you can give me," John said. He couldn't remember their name right now. Something with the word _last_—last chance, last hope...

In response, Finch pulled a long envelope from his inside jacket pocket. "Here are articles dating back to two thousand nine. This isn't everything about them, but it's a good start." After adjusting his glasses, he said, "As you would suppose, the group's alleged ideology follows the same patterns as a lot of white separatist groups, and as such is a cesspool of humanity's worst xenophobic tendencies."

John hadn't remembered that from the reports, although it didn't surprise him. Plenty of groups were paranoid of the government; for some of them, it went hand in hand with a deeply embedded racism.

Finch paused near the concrete barriers blocking access to the river while John considered what going undercover within the group would entail. That was the obvious route: the government agencies involved might be stepping over each other's feet in the field, but they would figure out too quickly that he wasn't one of them. Unless Finch could somehow help to incite them to go ahead and raid the land, thought John, and then he realized that there were too many variables. That could serve as a back-up plan if he couldn't make his way inside posing as an anti-government white supremacist.

Parroting the lines and swallowing his revulsion; John could fit in there. The lies he'd told, the lives he'd worn: he knew how to do this.

Carter couldn't, though. Even without the racist rhetoric as part of the group's cover, as a woman she would be an unlikely infiltrator in a group dominated by men of this type.

Joss had said it herself anyway—she could bluff someone, but long-term deception wasn't part of her makeup. Thanks to the convoluted protections built around the Machine, this wasn't a get-in, get-out job.

"I want you to keep an eye on Carter," John told Finch. "Not just throw numbers at her—make sure she's okay."

Finch turned and looked at Reese, an indignant expression crossing his face, quickly followed by an indecipherable look. "You're assuming that Detective Carter will be coming back here without you, then." He raised an eyebrow at John.

Not assuming, thought John. Hoping. Finch waited a moment longer before saying, "Of course I'll do my best to make sure she's safe, John." Harold looked ready to add caveats to his statement, but instead he pursed his lips and nodded.

Reese decided that it was Finch's best effort at looking reassuring, something the man didn't often try; he nodded back, resisting the impulse to repeat himself.

Holding the envelope up again, John said, "We'll talk again after I read through this." He knew he would have questions. Getting ready for immersing himself in deep cover meant learning as much as possible before leaving.

* * *

He called Joss that evening, looking at the flickering light from the bedside lamp as he keyed in her number. Another anonymous motel; the careful behavior was routine for him.

How much care to take was the question, of course. He believed in Finch's good intentions. But the Machine had proven itself to be a greater danger than Harold had ever dreamed, and there wasn't a magic off button anymore.

Carter agreed to meet him in Kansas City. He kept the conversation short, planning to tell her all that he'd learned face to face. The one piece of information he made sure to sure was that the Machine was temporarily neutralized.

If she didn't make it to Kansas City, he would know that Finch's reprogramming attempts had failed. And then John would go and find her, but for now he had to shut off that trickle of fear; there was nothing else to be done about her situation at this moment and he had work to do.

After the phone conversation, Reese met with Finch again. It still felt routine, in spite of his month-long absence: a late night talk, Finch tapping away at a keyboard and shooting down Reese's theories with occasional sarcastic comments. John had missed the blundering camaraderie.

Finch created a larger digital footprint for one of the IDs Reese had acquired in Belize. 'Sebastian' now had a history of minor infractions related to a belief in white supremacy as well as a username on various message boards—one that Harold had stolen from someone who was, in Finch's words, "safely out of the picture." It gave the cover identity an established pattern, one that ostensibly went back years.

Later John went back to the motel room and slept for a few hours, then spent the morning collecting supplies to load in the truck of one of Finch's cars. Most of it was weaponry and explosives.

The last time he'd used these types of explosive, he'd still been with the Army. He'd already left Jessica, telling himself that she would be better off without him.

Maybe they would have been happy if he'd stayed. He'd carried around a mental picture for years, a rose-tinted vision of Jessie and him and maybe a kid or two. But they had always been slightly out of synch: Jessica had been hesitant when he'd wanted more, had finally been demanding after he'd already gone too far down another path. Maybe he'd made her feel safe when they'd been together, but it might not have been enough.

Didn't matter though. When she'd asked him for something he should have been able to give her, he'd failed.

He couldn't let that happen to Joss. Or to her son. Maybe she would be angry at him for pushing her away, but that didn't matter as long as she was okay.

Time to start the drive to Kansas City.


	8. Chapter 8

It took John more than twenty hours to make the drive to Kansas City. His thoughts ran through a circular pattern: what to say to Joss, how to infiltrate the group, what Finch might learn while John was traveling, what Finch had already learned... leading back to what to say to Joss. He speculated on how she might react, tried to figure out the right words to say.

Joss was dedicated, passionate about what she believed in—but she also went where the information led. She wouldn't insist on going into a situation that was so obviously stacked against her from the beginning, especially without previous experience. He knew that. He also knew that some of his reasons for wanting her to go home were more selfish: so that he could focus on the mission, knowing that she would be safe. Safer than she would be in Idaho, at any rate. She had Fusco, who knew damn well that he'd better watch out for his partner. Finch had promised to keep an eye on her, too.

Joss was good at her job; better than most, even. He reminded himself of that, although it didn't make his concerns disappear.

John turned on the radio when he passed south of Pittsburgh, pressing the scan button anytime the music switched to love songs or commercials. Not much choice of stations between Indianapolis and St. Louis, and St. Louis to Kansas City; the noise was more of an irritant, but it helped keep him awake.

The first thing he did after getting to Kansas City was find a car to buy: something that his Sebastian cover would be able to afford and that wouldn't stand out in rural Idaho. He finally settled on a used car, American-made. Maybe that would matter to others, maybe it wouldn't, but Sebastian wouldn't buy foreign cars, he decided.

He transferred the equipment to the trunk of Sebastian's car and left it parked next to Finch's car, dryly amused at the irony of moving boxes of explosives and other weaponry in a hospital parking lot.

Then John waited inside Finch's car, windows rolled down, watching the sunset. Too hot here, he thought, but not like Houston. Not like Belize City. He'd talked to Carter a couple of hours ago on the phone. Ten minutes ago she'd used the military radio to let him know that she was almost there. He'd given her this location, wanting to keep an eye on his supplies and to keep the encounter less intimate than a hotel room.

Carter climbed into the passenger seat. It reminded him of showing up outside the prison, climbing into the front seat of her squad car to offer to help with Moretti. "Whenever you show up, trouble's right around the corner," she'd said that day. Joss was right about him; another reason for her to go back to New York City alone.

This evening she did a quick visual check of him—looking for visible damage, apparently—and then glanced at the car's interior. "Nice car," she told him. Her look expressed what she'd left unasked: curiosity about the vehicle. Finch had a tendency to buy things with an understated sheen of luxury; the cars John had stolen during their trek across various parts of the US were nothing like this.

"Thought I'd try something more upscale for a change," he told her.

She let out a small _hmph _noise and then asked, "So you have news? Good news, I hope."

He didn't know what part to discuss first, so he finally said, "You can go home now. That part is good news."

"I can go home? Meanwhile, you're doing what?" Her expression was skeptical. "Some lone wolf act?"

"There's a reason for it, Carter. You can't help on this one."

Joss raised both eyebrows. "Go ahead and tell me, then," she said.

He went straight to his first visit with Finch in New York City, telling her what he'd learned from Harold. Her only interruption after he started was a quick comment to the effect that she should have known he would visit Finch.

Wrapping it all up took surprisingly little time; no need to go into every detail about the group. She understood quickly enough the implications of what he told her.

"So you can see," he concluded, "that you wouldn't be an asset on this mission." He tried not to wince as he used the label, thinking of the Machine. Also thinking about how he'd used that label to describe her in an attempt to keep things impersonal. That hadn't worked very well.

While he'd been talking, she'd watched and listened, her face mostly blank. Habit left over from her time as an interrogator, or maybe just her current work practice.

After he finished, her expression shifted. One part of him irrationally anticipated that she would yell or burst into violence. That cringing reaction from childhood never completely went away, no matter how illogical he knew it was. She hadn't yelled when a murder suspect had accidentally gotten killed on his watch. Hadn't yelled when she was upset about Szymanski's injury and his betrayal. Carter wasn't like _her _at all.

Still, he felt a momentary nausea, looking at the fleeting expressions crossing her face. He watched her as she blinked quickly, her eyes wet as the emotional reaction caught up with her. "They made a racist hate group to help hide their machine. Our own government. I'm not sure whether I'm angrier at them or at myself for even being surprised."

She twisted her fingers together, the physical reaction betraying how strong her feelings were. Unthinkingly, he took her left hand in his, rubbing across the palm with his thumb.

"I know," he told her. "I'm sorry."

The expression on her face said that he didn't know, but Carter didn't pull her hand away. She took a deep breath and leaned back farther into her seat. "I assume you have a plan for this, then."

Her focus was already sliding past her anger and onto their objective, the soldier side of her character exerting itself. "Get onto that land, find some way in to the underground storage facility, blow it up."

"How did Finch know so much about it?" She shook her head briefly after asking the question, lowering her brows; it wasn't exactly what she wanted to know.

"How do I know I can trust him about it?" he rephrased for her.

"Yeah."

"You have to trust somebody," said John. "You trusted him before. What violated that trust wasn't him."

Her lips pursed together, she gave him a look as if to ask, _Is that all you have to say?_

"Finch is human. Capable of moral choices. The Machine learned from him, but it can't understand the value of a human life. It's just numbers in a really big box." Reese wondered if Finch's choice to teach the Machine what was relevant and irrelevant was part of what led the Machine down the path to deciding to eliminate people, rather than just identify terrorist threats. But that wasn't the point right now.

Joss still looked unconvinced. Finally John told her, "He tried to shut it down after what it did to you."

Frowning, she said, "I was right about not being the first one, wasn't I?"

He nodded. "Finch didn't know about them. Not until after the Machine went after you."

"How many?"

"I didn't ask," he replied. He didn't know if Finch had the exact number yet, either.

Sighing, she shifted their handhold, entwining her fingers with his. Letting go of the previous line of questioning, Joss asked, "So which government agencies are involved in this fiasco?"

"Outside the land? FBI and AATF. Local PD, too. Inside, anyone's guess. FBI, maybe NSA." He glanced at their hands and added, "The NSA is probably in charge of this. Someone has to know the real objective to coordinate this defense with the other agencies."

"FBI?" Carter shook her head. "I thought they were better than that." Joss continued asking him questions for several minutes, gradually winding down as she digested all that she'd learned.

After a few seconds of quiet she said, "If I'm not an asset, then I must be a liability." Her tone held a hint of humor, but he wasn't sure why she was repeating his words back to him.

He closed his eyes for a moment, trying to figure out what to say.

She let go of his hand and turned in her seat, studying his face. "Just because you're overprotective doesn't mean you're wrong about the situation."

"Overprotective?"

"Your life's in danger, Detective, I want you to start being more careful." Her voice was deeper and strangely husky; quoting his words and imitating his voice, he realized with a start. Was that what he had sounded like to her during those phone calls before she'd started working with them?

"I was right, though."

"That's what I said. Overprotective and right." She shook her head with a small grin. Curling her left leg onto the seat in order to face him more comfortably, Joss leaned closer. "There's gonna be a mess to clean up when I get home."

That was his opening to explain what Finch had arranged with her job; her expression of surprise would have been comical if he hadn't felt so concerned.

"So he thought of everything. Of course." After a pause she asked, "Any idea what kind of family emergency I'm supposed to have had?"

"You'll have to ask Fusco." The corners of her mouth curled up at that statement; speculating on what Fusco might have invented for her.

John took the keys from the ignition and held them in front of her. "If you want, you could go back in style."

"Really."

Pointing to the used car next to Finch's, John said, "Sebastian bought that one."

"And this one?"

He didn't answer her unasked question about the car's origins, uncertain whether its legal status would be reassuring, considering that it was Finch's money that had supplied it. "I'll leave it here if you don't need it."

She would drive it. Even with fake IDs and an urgency to get home to her son and pick up the threads of her life, it would be better to keep the more visible traces of her travels out of view. Using a credit card—even a fake one—and passing through airports: all of those activities would be recorded and visible to people with access.

Carter took the keys from his hands and said, "I'll have to tell Taylor not to get used to it."

Driving to Virginia first would make sense, considering the family emergency leave paperwork Fusco had filed. Taylor had maybe two more weeks before school started, John suddenly realized.

"Here's to hoping that Snow doesn't have surveillance on Taylor," she added. "Though maybe me showing up again will help keep the CIA busy on the east coast and not paying attention to what you're actually doing."

Reese had been wondering about Snow. In April the man had shown up at Carter's precinct with one of his operatives, warning Carter not to talk to the FBI. That was four months ago. It was surprising that the man had stayed out of view for so long.

Carter looked at John; they both hesitated, not sure what to say next. Leaving her behind again—this time it was his turn to go into the unknown.

"I have to go," John said, his voice gravelly. He wanted to tell her that he would miss her.

Carter sat in silence, studying his face. Finally she said, "Be careful, John." He wouldn't make any promises about that, but he nodded.

She looked like she was waiting for something, looking for something in him. He climbed out of the car, leaving her and her questioning looks.

* * *

John only made it a few kilometers before tiredness and hunger made him stop. That and the emotional toll taken by all the things they hadn't said. He'd driven long enough without a real break.

Joss would probably stay the night in town as well. They wouldn't be together but she wouldn't be far, not yet.

Joss would check into an anonymous hotel and buy something to eat: maybe Thai food, maybe a visit to a supermarket, where she would buy a paperback book to read. She would lie down and look at her telephone, the one with all the pictures of Taylor, and think about putting the battery back in when she got close to home.

He did that himself; after buying some food supplies, he found a hotel. Nothing too expensive, but not so cheap that it was an unusual security risk. He left some of the weaponry in the car trunk and hid the rest in his hotel room. The military cell phones and radios he left on the bedside table. (He'd forgotten to collect the radio from her, John suddenly realized. Good thing he had an extra; he might find some kind of outside help in Idaho to join his cause.)

His hotel room was bland, a blank canvas, but the bed was surprisingly comfortable. John plugged the various electrical devices into their chargers, creating a nightstand full of blinking lights. In the morning he would use the hotel's wi-fi to make some plans. Maybe by then Finch would call with more information as well.

"Are you there?" The radio crackled to life, startling John. Carter's voice came through with a slight amount of static; normal for the frequency-hopping that was part of the design of the military radios. "I had more things to say. But I couldn't, because you're officially an idiot."

Reese let out a surprised chuckle.

"Or I am. I'm an idiot." Self-deprecating humor wasn't her usual style; she must be feeling vulnerable.

He wanted to hear more of her voice, but she didn't say anything else. Finally he picked up the radio and said, "You're not an idiot."

Another pause. He waited, then the click: "You're not denying it for yourself, then."

"No."

She didn't transmit it, but he was certain she would laugh at that, or at least smile.

Then he realized that she'd gotten him to answer her, to acknowledge that he was listening. _That's my clever girl_, thought John.

Her next remark switched topics. "I should have remembered what it was like," she said. "Closing yourself off before leaving. For me it was so I wouldn't cry in front of Taylor. He was too little to understand why I would be leaving him for so long."

He closed his eyes, thinking about that. About what it would have been like for her, leaving her son with his grandmother. About when he'd left Jessica, telling himself that she was better off without him, telling himself that he was choosing a greater cause.

"You need to come back after this is over," she said. "That's what I wanted to tell you."

John held the radio close to his mouth, but he didn't click the button for several seconds. Finally he said, "Okay." Because she wanted to hear it. Because he wanted to say it, to think that she would still want him back in her life in any capacity.

"Okay, then." Apparently Joss had said what she wanted to say and gotten the response she wanted to hear. Enough of it, at least. Her next words were, "Aurora is spending her one and only night in Kansas City at a hotel with a pool. What's Sebastian doing?"

"Spending the night alone at a hotel with wi-fi. Are you going to go swimming?"

"I still don't have a suit. And I don't think they'll let me substitute my underwear here."

He let himself smile at that. John wanted to ask her about all the details she'd left out in their short daily calls since they'd parted ways in Florida. How she'd gotten as far west as Little Rock, Arkansas when he'd called her to arrange the meeting her. Where she'd stayed, what stories she'd told. Whether she'd thought about him.

Instead he asked, "Do you have a book to read?"

He imagined her letting out a brief laugh at the question. "Something with a blue dragon on the cover," she said. That wasn't what he'd expected to hear. "Taylor said he was reading it the last time we talked, and I recognized the name when I saw it." Then she laughed, keeping the line open for him to hear, and added, "I don't know if I'll be able to make it through. Too many made-up names and places."

His mother had never been so diligent in tracking what John was doing at that age.

Joss said a few more things, John asked a couple of questions... and he was struck by the realization that in spite of the separation and awkwardness of using radio communication, this was a normal conversation. Something regular people did, people who weren't on a potentially suicidal mission.

He was surprisingly comfortable with that; no acting required.

They ended with goodnight rather than goodbye.

* * *

He woke up with the sunrise, staying in bed for another twenty minutes, thinking about the radio conversation and the hope it gave him.

Time to put that away, he thought as he repacked his bag. It was more difficult with Joss than it had been with Jessica. His moments with Jessica had been an escape, but it had been his choice to let her go. Joss was entwined in his life, with his work; he had mental images of her shooting by his side, of her teasing him, of her passing along information, of her dedication to their shared cause.

He had a mission to do, but it was in part for her. John didn't want to let her go.

Finally he took all of the things that mattered most and put them away: Carter, Finch, even Fusco. He boxed them up tight for safe keeping.

Another twenty hours on the road. He drove over flat prairies, the horizon a line so straight that it looked like it was drawn with a ruler. Eventually distant mountains drifted into view, their somber blue and gray peaks a contrast to the green and tan grasslands. Finally into the mountains, where he was surrounded by pines and aspen, an ocean of inescapable green.

He found a place to pull over and sleep a few hours after passing through Laramie, Wyoming. He woke up before dawn when his cell phone beeped with a new text. It said simply, **55**.

John got on the road again, not stopping until he passed Rexburg, Idaho.

The paramilitary compound wasn't far from a town. The place was barely big enough to merit the title. It had a café, a bar, and one tiny service station with some groceries. The small elementary school and a few other businesses made a small series of dots along the highway.

Reese had breakfast at the café. It was a good place to start recon. In the afternoon he explored the other towns in the region and found a hotel; for now he preferred to sleep at a distance from where he hoped to be working. Finally that evening he went back to the town for a drink at the bar.

John was trying to avoid bar fights, much like he'd been doing ever since leaving New York with Joss. No shooting kneecaps, avoid pulling out the weapons unless necessary, no unnecessary brawls: extra precautions to keep off the Machine's radar. Now he was trying to stay off the radar as a potential threat to the locals, at least until he knew the terrain. Spycraft, not vigilantism.

The others in the bar weren't exactly scintillating conversationalists, he noticed. At least not with an outsider. He contented himself with stray comments about hunting, something he'd researched before getting to Idaho. White-tailed deer would be fair game in a few days; mule deer were still off limits until October.

John received a few suspicious glances when the topic changed to taxes. No one wanted to engage him about the subject.

He'd been carefully nursing his first beer; he still had to drive the fifteen miles back to his hotel, all on poorly lit two-lane state highways. Finally he ordered a second, asking for some fries to go with it. Normally he wouldn't bother eating more than a couple of fries, but he'd been on the road long enough and needed the food. Their salty taste made him take a few quick gulps of his beer to wash them down.

Moments later he found himself staring at the bubbles rising from the bottom of the glass, sliding up to join the foamy head.

His head started to spin. He felt tired and oddly detached, like all logic and emotions had been pulled out of his body, leaving an exhausted shell.

The room was blurry; voices reverberated, a tank of echoes that stripped away meaning from the words. Something's wrong, he thought. John didn't panic; of course it was wrong, but it didn't matter.

"...were going to wait until I got here... party," he heard, and a hand reached over to his arm. He watched as the hand pulled at him; his legs pushed his body up. The pale hand held him tightly, guiding him as they walked to the door.

Finally he mustered enough energy to look at the face that went with the hand. I know that face, thought John, and then the colorful blur faded to gray.


	9. Chapter 9

His arms ached—that was the first thing he noticed. As soon as he tried to move, he rapidly noticed other things: he couldn't move his arms more than a few inches and his head was throbbing. A sudden burst of nausea struck, making John gasp in an effort to keep it under control and not vomit. The skin on his face felt cold as he broke into a sweat.

"It will pass," he heard. A familiar voice, although right now he couldn't place it. "Sorry about that, by the way." A slender hand reached down and wiped his forehead with a cloth.

John pursed his lips and breathed through his nose, counting seconds for each breath as a way of distracting himself. Think, he ordered himself. How did he get here?

The last thing he could remember was drinking at the bar, staring at a half-empty beer mug.

His hands were bound, pulled over his head. That was why he couldn't move them. Tied to a bedpost, he assumed. Expertly tied knots; they didn't have any slack. Shifting his legs, he could feel the same kind of tension around his ankles. Bound hand and foot, then.

"You're asking yourself how you got here," said the woman. "The answer is I drugged you and you walked out of that bar with me." A pause, followed by: "Well. I didn't drug you. The bartender did. He owes me a favor."

"Kara."

"John," she mimicked, her tone oddly affectionate. He didn't know if that emotion was real or manufactured. Her face came into view as she stepped closer. Same familiar features: sharp nose, brown eyes accented by arched brows, her long hair pulled back in a braid. She was wearing olive drab trousers and two tees, short sleeves over long.

He did a visual sweep of the room and was shocked by the recognition. It was his hotel room. Kara pulled a chair close to the bed and sat, studying him, analyzing everything. "We need to talk."

She would have the advantage; he wasn't at his best, to say the least. A flash of humor crossed her face, acknowledging the disparity in their situations.

"I was surprised to see you here," she said. Not so surprised that she couldn't figure out a way to subdue him with typical efficiency.

"I checked on what you were doing a few months ago, and I don't get it. Whoever's holding your leash, it's still a leash." She leaned back. "I would've thought you'd had enough of that before." Her lips twisted in a faint admission that she had done her share of leash-holding in their relationship.

After a pause, she kept talking. "Nothing to say to that? How about I share something, then. True confessions time. It turns out I have resentment issues about being left for dead, even when it's what I expected."

John had a guess about what was coming next. "I killed Mark," Kara told him. Bingo. That was a loose end he'd ignored for too long: checking on why Snow had stopped following Carter around.

Kara had more to say about it. "He had information I needed. And then I didn't need anything else from him."

He wondered if he should he congratulate her. Maybe offer his thanks? But for all that Mark Snow had been malignant, he'd also been doing his job. John had thought more than once about taking him out himself, but he'd decided against it. The bitterness he felt encompassed more than one person; killing Snow wouldn't be enough. Not to mention that Snow was extremely capable of taking care of himself.

"You have information I need, too," said Stanton, her gaze direct. The threat was implied but clear; she didn't bother with predatory glares. "I don't want to hurt you, but I will get it."

"Ask me a question, then."

Her head tilted to the left, a concession that so far all she'd done was set the tone and maybe bait him. "What's your goal here?" she asked.

Straightforward enough. He'd been using the time before this to try and figure out what to say. Stanton was smaller than him, not as strong, but he still felt ill and was immobilized well enough to make him vulnerable to anything she wanted to do. He didn't doubt that she had more drugs, and weapons, and her own sharp mind. The question was why was she here? And would her purposes jeopardize his?

"I have some business to take care of for a friend," he finally said.

"Long way to travel."

If she was still working for the Company, anything he might say would be too much. But even with all her deceptions, he believed her about Mark's death and about her resentment over her 'retirement' order. He wanted to believe her presence here wasn't to protect the Machine.

"There's a threat out here, and I'm going to eliminate it."

"A threat." He could almost see her examining his answer, word for word. "But not a person," she guessed.

He caught himself holding his breath and forced himself to breath normally.

Kara's expression shifted; John thought she was going to ask him for more details, but instead she asked, "Does the man who holds your leash know that you want to take down what he built?"

John tried to keep his expression blank. She obviously knew about the Machine; that meant she was probably here to keep it safe after all. Damn.

After a few seconds of her eyes carefully scanning his, she quietly said, "He does. Well." He wondered how much of her previous statement had been a guess, but she'd gotten enough from him to think she had confirmation. Kara knew too many of his tells.

She stood up and walked over to a small table in the corner of the room. John recognized most of the supplies on it; Kara had gone through the room and pulled items out of the places where he'd hidden them.

Picking up the radio, she carried it back to her chair and sat, leaning back slightly. Her hands went over the radio, fingers investigating the knobs. A stalling tactic to give herself time to think; that meant she was nervous or undecided about something.

Finally she asked, "What makes you believe that it's a threat? Because I can't quite believe the change of heart. Not from you. You always threw yourself into everything, and it took dying to get you out last time." Dying, he assumed, referred to Ordos. When she'd shot him.

"What did you see before?" How long had she followed him in New York without him realizing it? he wondered.

"You were helping the man who built it. A dead man, by the way. More dead than either of us." She gestured toward him with the radio. "Dead under more than one name."

Her hands stopped tracing the pieces of the military radio. Kara looked like she had more to say, but she stopped herself, instead telling him, "I answered your question. So you need to answer mine."

Trust Kara to turn everything he thought he knew sideways, leaving him grasping for a direction. He decided to opt for the truth because he didn't know what else to say. And because Kara would know; she had mapped him as surely as her fingers had explored the details of that radio.

"It—the Machine—decided a friend of mine was a threat."

"The Machine. Well now, there's a utilitarian designation. Not very creative." Kara shrugged her shoulders, an elegant gesture in contrast with her practical attire. Getting to the point, she said, "You don't have any friends. So that leaves us with either the dead man or one of your two pet detectives. And I can't quite believe that the dead man would be targeted by his own creation. Though the irony would certainly be delicious."

Somehow he'd let himself forget this about her—or he'd tried to drink those memories away. Kara Stanton was terrifying and accurate when she had enough information to make informed guesses. It was one of the reasons why she was such an effective operative for the Agency.

She stood up again and wandered back to the table that held the supplies he'd hidden in the hotel room and his car. It looked like she'd found all of it; not many places to hide items in a cheap concrete motel room.

He knew what she would see: explosives and detonators, weaponry, mil-spec phone and radios. They would all confirm the information he'd given her. He wondered what she would make of the radios, plural.

John had debated getting rid of them, but the possibility of finding some kind of back-up had let him to hold on to them. Plus he'd worked hard to get them; no need to trash them when he didn't have to limit his supplies just yet.

"So who was it that this Machine threatened?" asked Stanton. "Pudgy or pretty?" She narrowed her eyes and looked at him, clearly enjoying this part of the guessing game. "Pudgy would get dragged here to help if it was him. Or maybe not. But he'd fit in better, and Pretty isn't the right color for this crowd."

She temporarily abandoned her guesses and asked, "So a threat against just one person—one _friend_—is enough to make you change your mind?"

He was still clueless about Kara's goals. He was also still feeling the nausea and headache from whatever drug the bartender had slipped into his drink; his head was swimming. But even if her goal here was shielding the Machine, giving her more information about it wouldn't matter. She would either kill him, or not, but maybe more information would make her stop and think about what she was working to protect.

"It targets people who get too curious about things. It targets people for reasons that we don't know." It had gone way past what Finch had programmed it to do, he thought. The man who had no scruples about spying on everyone with his creation was horrified at what it was now doing.

John wondered for a moment if he would have done it—would have gone along with the order to build something that accessed everyone's information illegally. He hadn't thought twice about using it as a resource when he learned of its existence, but would he have questioned the morality behind it if he'd been involved in its creation?

Maybe, maybe not. He'd certainly followed enough orders in his life without openly questioning them to prove that he wasn't the man who would loudly denounce something as inherently wrong. Everything he did was a reaction: reenlist when his country was attacked, leave the job he'd learned to hate—even though he did it so well—only when left for dead. Try to take down the Machine only after it posed a threat.

Kara turned and walked into the tiny bathroom; he heard the water running for a moment. John wiggled his wrists and ankles, pulling at the bonds.

He went still before she came back in the room. She carried a plastic cup toward him, a straw already bobbing in the water. Taking a sip first, she then held the cup close enough for him to take a drink.

The cup was small—small enough that he went ahead and drank all of the water.

"What were you going to do to get rid of it?" Kara asked. She'd already seen all of his supplies, since they were now stacked neatly on the table or on the floor next to the table.

"Blow it up," he said.

Stanton stepped back to the wall facing the bed, sliding down until she was sitting on the floor. She took the pistol out from her waistband; it had been tucked in the small of her back. She sat there without talking for five minutes, then ten: staring at the weapon, staring past him at the wall. John worked on slipping his wrist through the knots again—just the hand farthest from her view, trying to keep the rest of his body still. It didn't do him much good; the rope didn't have enough stretch to it, and he couldn't get enough leverage with his legs bound so tightly as well.

Finally she took the pistol and emptied the barrel, catching the shells in her hand and pocketing them. "You'll never be able to do it alone," she told him.

He held his breath again, waiting to see what else she would say.

"You're lucky that it was me who found you at the bar. They don't like agents very much here, and they're suspicious of everyone."

He watched her face, her expression less doubtful than before. "And as it so happens, I could use a hand. I could do it on my own, but not as fast."

"You're trying to..."

"To destroy that machine, yes."

He couldn't quite believe what she was saying. But she could have killed him at any moment in the last several hours. She wanted him for some reason. Maybe even the reason she'd said.

"Why do you want to destroy it?"

"Not your business," she answered, her tone factual rather than sharp. Standing and taking a knife from the table, she walked over to him and cut the knot from his left wrist.

"Someone's waiting for me. They'll look for me if I disappear, but it won't matter a whole lot if they don't find me. So you could kill me. But I can get us in there." After that short speech, she put the knife into his left hand and waited by the bed, in close proximity and weaponless.

Not much of a choice. He could trust that she genuinely wanted the same thing as him, or kill her before she killed him. She'd had the opportunity ever since the bartender drugged him at her behest, though.

John had failed to kill her once before. They'd been through too much together, or so he'd thought back then. Even now—hers wouldn't exactly be innocent blood, but shedding it might be unnecessary. He'd already done enough unnecessary killing.

Kara watched as he used the knife to cut the cords around his right hand. Sitting up, he cut the ropes from his ankles as well and then leaned forward, breathing deeply as the recurring nausea faded.

Standing up and wincing from the aching muscles, John handed her the knife without comment.

After he'd taken care of his body as best he could while still reeling from Stanton's roofie, John and Kara spent the next several hours talking, making plans. He ignored the residual nausea and fatigue, as he'd done so often in the field. Much like he did in New York City as well.

Kara volunteered information at a surprising rate, explaining her cover story and what she'd observed during her time with the militia members.

"I get sent out here to use my 'feminine wiles'." John could hear the quotation marks as she said it. "I'm supposed to flirt with the men they suspect are undercover agents." What she did instead was have the bartender drug them, or use a sneak attack to bring them down. Then she left them in their hotel rooms, sometimes with a note to let them know they'd been made.

He had to laugh at the efficiency of it.

At one point he blurted out one of the questions that popped into his head. "Weren't the government agencies watching the land suspicious of you?"

"No one looks at the women." She half-smiled as she said it. "Even when they should know better. They think I'm just another one of the wives or girlfriends. I take care not to get noticed or leave prints when I'm dealing with the wanna-be infiltrators. And it's not as if the CIA is going to share its intel with the FBI. Even if they did, the Company thinks I'm dead."

Leaning forward, she added, "You should have taken better care to stay dead yourself. As it is, I'd vote you don't shave that beard until after this—" she swept her hands around as if to indicate all of their plans and supplies—"is done."

He had a better cover story than any of the agents Kara had exposed. Seb—they'd agreed the nickname was better—had a long online history, reaching back well before two thousand nine when the group had formed. Finch's efforts gave John a real chance at pulling off this charade.

While they planned, John tried again to find out what Kara was up to: why did she want to destroy the Machine? Few people were as skilled as she was at keeping her motivations and emotions opaque, however. That trip to Ordos had marked one of the few moments where she'd opened up about her feelings—right before she'd shot him. Maybe the opacity was a good sign.

At this point they had to trust each other: not for their motivations, but at least they could rely on a shared confidence in their abilities, both individually and as a team.

They moved some supplies to various 'safe' places—which included the back room of the bar where Kara had drugged him. It was full of boxes, some of them dusty and crumpled. Kara's few additions were apparently unnoticed by the bartenders and manager.

* * *

Getting him inside the Last Hope ranch went more smoothly than he dared hope for. Kara told him to stay out of sight, so he'd crouched down on the floorboards. The federal agents outside weren't yet stopping people coming and going; instead they kept a close watch to learn what they could by observation. Maybe they had a heat detector to check for hidden passengers, but that wouldn't get them an image of him.

"He's not going to like me much, but his story checks out," Kara announced as she hauled him in front of a group of men. They were all dressed in clean, militant-style clothing; some had short hair or even shaved scalps, but others had long hair and beards.

Kara continued with her seemingly spontaneous introduction. "Some of you might've interacted with him on the White Eagle forum." Several of the men nodded their heads in recognition at the mention of the website.

One of the men, a burly man wearing olive drab, interrupted Kara before she could say anything else. "Is he going to bring Feds down on us?" Those around him reacted in different ways; to John it appeared that some looked anxious for a showdown, while others wanted to avoid trouble. "Any outstanding warrants?" asked the man, addressing John now rather than Kara.

"Not unless you count a couple of parking tickets," John answered.

The burly man continued to eye him, as if he could measure qualities such as hot-headedness by a mere glance.

With attention diverted from Kara, other conversations sprouted up around the room. Some were discussing their leader—referred to in deferential tones—and his plan for when to go against the government agents. No way of knowing how much the men actually knew, and how much they were guessing. John listened and thought again about trying to instigate a flare-up and blowing up the Machine during the potential shoot-out. His conclusion was the same as before: it was too risky unless other attempts failed.

When Kara had been giving him her assessment of the people on the ranch, she had called herself third tier at best. It was easy to pick out the power structure she had described. Some of these men who were at the same level respected her; she had influence with them. Others dismissed her completely—the men who started their side conversations before she'd finished talking.

Just as Kara had said, there were no other women at this level. Somehow she managed to weave her terrifying magic even with these men; they didn't defer to her, but she had access and privilege that the other women didn't. Impressive considering that these men had a culture that discouraged women speaking out.

* * *

His first full day at the ranch established the pattern: personal workout routines plus an early and a mid-morning breakfast shift, depending on preference. Preparation drills of various kinds until noon, including hand-to-hand and firearms practice. Lunch back in the main dining area, though sometimes people took their food outside. Afternoons they spent doing different projects for their 'safety,' including making fake license plates for the small fleet of vehicles parked under the east half of the large barn. Dinner, then free time, which mostly consisted of talking shit with the other men in his bunk area.

No television here; it was considered a tool of indoctrination. One radio station was occasionally permitted, depending on the hour and the program playing.

The boredom of all of this was punctuated by concerns about keeping his cover. Seb had credentials in part because of Finch's careful manipulation, but John had only had time to read through those forum posts twice. It was a careful balancing act, trying to keep the same tone as those forum posts someone else had made six or seven years ago. He felt sick just mouthing the words.

Other than Kara, the women here were like ghosts. Almost no one spoke to them as they quietly served food. Those who had husbands and children had private family space. A few women had a shared bunk area, smaller than the men's because more single men lived there than single women.

Kara shared the bunk space with the women, but spent her days in a variety of activities: sometimes training with them, other times running errands in the outside world.

Working toward her goal of taking down the Machine, she had already established some routine behaviors. Every morning she jogged outside, covering a new section of the ranch in an attempt to find the location of the Machine, so far without success.

Starting the third morning, John followed her on her runs. They'd agreed to have Seb play the role of a man obsessed with the woman who had bested him before she brought him in. The people living here would attribute Seb's interest to either a desire for revenge (for whatever womanly tricks they thought she had used) or a fascination with Kara. Either way, him following her around would be understood.

Thanks to Finch, John knew the exact coordinates of the Machine. On one of their runs they used a GPS locator to get to the right place: a rocky hillside. The two of them finally figured out that the slope hid the entrance under two large stones that were angled together to form what looked like a small niche. It would be a tight fit for John.

They were careful to give the appearance of two people taking a breather during their run—as much as they could, at any rate. Who knew if the terrain had surveillance? Too many ways now to make cameras blend in seamlessly with the environment.

Same with their morning run; it was one of their few chances to talk without people standing within earshot, but someone could be listening in anyway.

Having gotten John inside the ranch and located the Machine, their next job was to bring in the supplies for the explosives. Kara got to leave more often than him; she was sent to buy things, or to practice her feminine wiles, to John's sardonic amusement now that he knew the joke from experience. The dark humor fit the rest of the situation as well; the men on the ranch didn't come close to her when she wore a dress. It was like she was made of glass, untouchable. No... like somehow her femininity was contagious. She taped supplies to her thighs on those days. Other times they hid things at the bottom of their bags, or put small items into pockets. Once they brought in a larger piece inside the spare tire in the trunk.

In addition to the drills and secretive projects, John's days inside Last Hope ranch were filled with attempts at pretend friendships with men who held beliefs that were deeply repugnant to him. Getting out once for a brief foray to "protect" Stanton on a difficult supply run was a relief. Having to duck down on the floorboards again to avoid being spotted by the agents outside the gates didn't diminish his enjoyment of the sortie.

Bringing the supplies in took time. Deciding how to store them took planning as well. No one had much privacy. They started taking a small backpack on their morning runs, ostensibly to carry water bottles and snacks. Some days that was exactly what they had. Other days they used the bag to transport their supplies, hiding them inside a waterproof bag that they stowed under a rock about one klick away from the Machine's entrance.

Today they wore their usual running clothes: sleeveless shirts, military-issue camouflage trousers. Kara sat next to him on the ground, pulling the latest delivery out of the backpack, staring at it instead of putting it underground. She looked up at the landscape. The meadow curved upward like the inside of a bowl, leading into the mountains; part of an old volcano that had collapsed over a million years ago.

September sixth. Thursday after Labor Day. Taylor Carter would have started school this week. John limited his thoughts to that one piece of information, as he'd been doing for the last two weeks.

Kara squinted as she glanced at the sun rising over the mountains to the east. "Do we have enough yet?" she finally asked. John wanted to smile at her reluctant question; she hated not knowing all of the information first.

They had transported nearly all of the C4 hidden in the back room of the bar. The schematics Finch had provided—which he'd destroyed before arriving in Idaho—had given him enough of a size estimate. He'd packed a bit extra, and they already had enough detonators and wires. "I think we're good," he told her.

"Then let's go ahead and do this."

He was surprised, although this fit with her patterns of behavior. To keep her partners from subconsciously (or consciously) sending out signals about upcoming plans, she would keep the moment of action a secret. John should have known. But there wasn't any reason to delay, and he was more than ready to finish this. "Getaway plans?" he asked her.

"The location is far enough away from the ranch that they shouldn't feel anything. Especially since it's all buried in the hillside. I say we jog back, take a car and get the hell out of here."

He had no possessions he wanted to retrieve from the bunkroom. John wanted nothing to remind him of his time here; other than Stanton's presence (both worrying and reassuring) there was nothing here that he would consider revisiting. Not even the beautiful mountains.

She turned to him and gave a half-smile, a sincere one. "You know why I waited for you to wake up, instead of leaving you there?" Or killing him; John knew that was another possibility with her.

He shrugged and lifted his eyebrows.

"The C4 I found in your room. Those other men I had drugged, they all thought they could infiltrate the leadership there. They probably knew nothing of the Machine; they were just assigned to get intel or put a stop to the standoff. But you—you had explosives and detonators, and I had this tiny hope that maybe we'd work together on the same side one more time."

It was as close to an apology as Kara would ever offer for shooting him. He nodded; they both reached over and started pulling supplies out of the crevice, using the plastic bag to hold what wouldn't fit in the backpack. John shouldered it while Kara wore the backpack and carried a few more items in her hands.

After that everything flashed by quickly; it felt almost unreal to go to this part of the hillside one last time, to finally crawl through the small space and into the short tunnel, to push through the metal door (surprisingly easy to get through) and enter the large room that held all of the servers required to hold the world's information and run the Machine's complicated software.

The space smelled of ozone with all of the hardware running. Cool air circulated throughout the room. Watching for surveillance cameras, John went to what he judged to be the middle of the area. From there both walls were distant.

John felt dwarfed in the large room. "Let's get started," Stanton said.

They both had experience with explosives; Army for him and the Marines for her, plus more training with the CIA. Kara moved with expert efficiency, carefully placing the explosives and connecting them. John did the same with the other half of the room.

He checked his watch more than once; it was hard to keep track of time in the windowless space, especially with the dim lighting. Presumably someone came around now and then to do routine maintenance, but that would require bright lights only on rare occasions.

Eventually they met in the middle of the room again; dividing up the last few supplies, they checked over each other's work, both from old habit and from nervousness. Finally they wordlessly agreed that they'd done everything they could. Stanton carried the main detonator; John watched for any prying eyes as they left the cold space, going back into the bright sunlight.

They jogged a few hundred meters before stopping under a tree. Kara gave him an inquisitive look and he nodded.

She pressed the button. The rocky hillside in front of them shook visibly and a few cracks formed on the surface. Birds in nearby trees bolted out in quickly formed flocks. Then they heard a quiet, short rumble and felt a short, jerking motion from the ground underfoot.

After that everything stopped. The world around them was silent for a few seconds, and then the birds swooped back into place and resumed their usual songs.

It was done, but nearly everything looked the same. John felt the tension he'd been holding fall away from his shoulders. The two of them had work to do to get out of here, but the job was finished.

They started jogging back to the buildings, putting on bursts of speed to try and outrun each other, grinning in the mid-morning sunshine.

As they got closer to the buildings, they slowed down to cool off. Stanton caught her breath and said, "I have one thing to do. It will take two minutes at most. Meet me at the car?"

John nodded; she headed on a path toward the back entrance while he ambled toward the old barn.

He was still on an endorphin high; that was his only explanation for how he let those men get the jump on him as he went into the shade of the barn.


	10. Chapter 10

Just a quick reminder that this story takes a turn from the end of season one. There's no Bear, Finch's abduction by Root had a different resolution, HR hasn't made a reappearance, Stanton killed Snow (or she says she did, at any rate), etc.

* * *

He squinted, trying to adjust to the shade in the east half of the barn after the bright sunlight. Through the blurry spots swirling in his vision, he could make out three men; the way they were grouped around him indicated a potential fourth. They had several advantages: the element of surprise, vision already adapted to the dimmer light, their weapons. John would have to wait.

One held a Smith & Wesson M&P pointed directly at his chest. Someone had pulled the Heckler & Koch from the small of John's back, where it had been tucked into his waistband. The two men at his sides had grabbed his upper arms; that fourth man John had sensed helped them snap on handcuffs.

They then tied his upper arms together behind his back as well, leaving his shoulders pulled back slightly, like a trussed-up turkey for Thanksgiving. It kept him slightly off-balance. Sweat was still trickling down his chest and bare arms from the run back. He blocked out the discomfort and started calculating how to move when his chance came.

He wondered if he should have gone ahead and struck out in spite of the disadvantages. But he'd trained with these men; they weren't going to be easy to catch off-guard without a distraction.

"What's going on here, fellas?" he asked. "This some kind of hazing ritual?" John hoped that this would break the tension, but no one said anything in reply. They started pushing him toward the other half of the barn, going through a side entrance.

"There must be a misunderstanding," he told them. "We're on the same side here." Still no answer; finally John said, "Okay, then. Take me to your leader."

John had never said that phrase out loud before. The whole situation felt so off-kilter that he almost wanted to laugh at the weird mounting tension.

"That's what we're doing," said Dave, the burly man who had questioned John about outstanding warrants his first day on the ranch. They pushed him through to the west side of the barn.

Another armed man was standing next to the man in charge. Merrell Gregor: he was built like Fusco, with more of a paunchy belly. Not a stereotypical G-man in appearance, which was the point, although he had a compelling magnetism when he spoke.

Gregor looked him over. "So you're the one," he said. He sounded like the weight of the world had been dropped onto his shoulders; John didn't reply.

He didn't know if Kara had set him up or if someone else had noticed something. Either way, he needed to find an opening, something to give him enough leverage to get out of the situation.

All of the men were armed. Six against one. He was handcuffed, and his arms were pulled tightly behind his back.

Damn.

That was the moment when he knew exactly what he wanted, clear like lightning in a dark sky. He wanted to live: not just survive, or float in a passively suicidal existence. He wanted to see the people he cared about—because he did have friends now. He wanted to find a new purpose, and to see the leaves change in Central Park this fall. To peek in on Leila and her grandparents.

To see Joss and Harold and even Fusco.

He'd said to Megan Tillman that taking a life meant losing the best part of yourself, and then he'd told Andrew Benton that he'd lost _good _a long time ago. Somehow Harold and Joss had stitched some of those edges back into place, small pieces that couldn't replace the whole, but that held together in their own way.

The five men looked to Gregor, waiting for a directive. Instead, Gregor asked him, "Do you know what you've done?"

John kept his expression carefully neutral. The longer he could drag this out, the better his chances of finding an opening. Gregor kept his distance from John; the weapon in his right hand didn't waver.

Gregor looked at John and finally said, "You've taken away the best protection we had." His voice was quiet, his tone accusatory.

One of the men near John shuffled his feet; easy to guess that they were confused by Gregor's statements, but no one verbalized their concerns. Instead they stayed in place, loyal guards to their king.

As John looked for his chance, there was a quiet popping noise and then a thud. Everyone tensed, and Gregor stepped close, leaning forward as if to grab John. John pivoted to stay out of reach, pushing at one of the men next to him. Suddenly blood splattered on John's right shoulder and he heard a louder _pop_.

Gregor was down in front of him, his head a bloody mess. John kept moving, using his body as a weapon as much as possible: legs, shoulders, feet, head. His goal was to disable and disarm the men.

Kara came into view, going for kill shots, mowing the men down as quickly as she could without hitting John. She must have grabbed a vest, he realized, when he saw her go down after a direct hit. No blood, and she started pushing herself through the pain and shock of the hit.

John moved to take out the man who had shot at her. While the man was reeling but still upright, Kara shot him from her position on the floor, right through the forehead. The body fell to the right, hitting the floor hard.

The room went silent and still. He glanced at the men on the ground, at the blood pooled around Gregor's head and the awkward positioning of the leg of the last man Kara had shot.

In contrast to the blood and carnage, the rays of the sun filtered through the south-facing door, lighting up dust motes in that corner and making them sparkle.

Kara wheezed, "You forgot to track your surroundings, didn't you?" He looked at her, seeing the frown between her eyes, and let out a laugh. Of course she would criticize his technique. And yes, he'd been sloppy, letting himself get taken like that.

"I'd help you up, but..." He tilted his head instead of shrugging.

"Gimme a second," said Kara, still wheezing. Finally she pushed herself up, leaning her torso forward for a moment and then standing upright.

After picking the lock on the cuffs and cutting through the makeshift binds, she looked down at Gregor. "I never did like him," she said.

The man's real name was Gerald Osborn, John suddenly remembered. He'd locked up that piece of information, since Seb wouldn't have a way of knowing it. Did Gerald Osborn have anyone who would miss him? Or had he cut those ties long before?

"You're bleeding," Stanton said, interrupting John's reverie.

"No, I'm not," replied John, but then he felt it—a low-level burning pain in his right arm, right below the blood spatter. Someone must have taken a shot at him while he was moving. John flexed his arm, wincing at the scrape pulling along his skin. Longer than the wound Carter had gotten six weeks ago, but more shallow. No point in stitching or gluing it shut; it would stop bleeding soon enough.

Kara glanced around the barn, grabbed a cloth that looked relatively stain-free and handed it to him. "Clean it up later," she said, heading back toward the other side of the barn, weapon in hand. He grabbed a pistol from the floor and followed her lead.

As they entered the east side of the barn, John reached for two of the homemade license plates while Kara looked for car keys. She unlocked the black Ford. Ducking down on the floorboards of the car, John dropped the license plates there and held onto the pistol he'd taken.

Kara drove to the front gate and entered the highway, quick and steady on the main road. Hopefully this was the last time her face would be captured on camera by the agents outside of Last Hope Ranch.

He didn't want to think about the place again; he needed confirmation from Finch and a clean getaway.

"Where to?" she asked.

"My car. Unless you have a better plan in mind." They had hidden Sebastian's car before she drove him to the ranch the first time, a few supplies stowed in the trunk.

"That's fine," she said, not bothering to say anything else after that.

He had a dozen questions running through his mind, but at this moment none of them mattered. Kara hadn't betrayed him. He was safe for the moment. Now they needed to put as much distance between them and the ranch as possible.

It took them about twenty minutes to get to the dirt road, and another five to arrive at the area where they'd hidden his car in the underbrush. Kara stayed and helped him clear the branches.

"Why did you go back inside?" he finally asked.

She surprised him—and maybe herself—with an honest answer. "To ask Lorianne if she wanted to leave." Lorianne was Burly's wife. "She said no." Kara shrugged and then added, "She also told me that Head Boy was up to something."

At that point Kara had grabbed a vest and a silencer before making her way to the barn to find him.

Had Lorianne been a source that Kara had cultivated, or someone who had been looking for a way to rebel on her own? And why had the woman stayed?

What surprised John the most was that Kara had tried to pull someone out in addition to taking down the Machine. It was truly astonishing; the woman who compartmentalized everything had let down some of her implacable boundaries.

They finished clearing the branches off Seb's car. After wiping away some of the dust, John intended to drive east to Wyoming, then back to New York City.

"I think we're even now," Kara told him. Her eyebrows were slightly raised, her eyes tracking his face. In spite of the wording, it was a question rather than a statement.

John nodded. He didn't have any say in cosmic justice, but whatever balance was needed, she'd managed it with him.

The corner of her mouth curled up in a small smile. "Maybe I'll see you around, John. Back in the city, or at that place in Montana." So she knew about that. Snow wasn't the only one who had accessed John's file.

"Where are you heading to next?" he asked, not expecting an answer.

"Utah."

"More stuff to blow up?" he asked.

Kara just smiled. He turned and grabbed the second license plate from her car, leaving the other one for her. By the time he was standing upright again, she was already at the wheel and starting the engine, leaving him standing there in a cloud of dust as she drove away.

In spite of her phrase about seeing him around, he doubted that they would meet again. Kara wasn't the kind of person to dwell on the past, except for how it affected the present. He didn't need to see her again either; they'd made their peace.

She hadn't called him Reese during this whole mission, he suddenly realized. When had he stopped using it for himself? Sometime after leaving New York City, he thought. Maybe because Joss always called him by his real first name.

After wiping the rest of the dust off the windshield and windows, John grabbed a pair of clean socks from the trunk and carefully wiped the blood away from his arm. The bleeding was slowing down already, stinging rather than aching. It might bruise a bit later.

He wanted to do one more thing before driving away from here: get confirmation from Finch that they had finished the job. That would have to wait, however; no cell tower signal out here. Instead he drove down the dirt road and then turned left onto the highway, pulling off when he finally had enough signal strength to send the text.

_Is it done? _was all that he asked. Then he put the cell phone in the coin holder, within easy reach, and drove: north and then east.

Fifteen minutes after John had sent the text to Finch, he got a reply: a simple yes, followed a few seconds later by _Excellent work, Mister Reese._

He pulled off the road again and allowed himself a minute to feel jubilant. It was done. Carter wasn't in danger from the Machine, nor was anyone else. He'd done what she'd wanted to accomplish. Finch had congratulated him.

He didn't know what he would do now, but he'd finished this job.

Grabbing the cell phone again, he texted Carter. _We did it, _he tapped into the keyboard. After that he turned off the phone. Just because the Machine was no longer out there didn't mean that government agencies couldn't monitor cell phones anymore. John needed to move on, away from where the Machine had been.

Blinking quickly a few times, he waited a moment before pulling back on the highway. An ordinary day in Idaho, the sun tilted slightly to the west now, the mountains with their sharp peaks, the trees framing the roads: all of it felt different now.

After thirty minutes of driving, he came to a junction and, on a whim, turned north once more instead of continuing east into Wyoming. Kara had mentioned Montana; John wanted to see that cabin again.

Those memories drifted back, distant echoes of the family he'd wanted to keep. He'd only had three summers at the cabin in Montana with Great-Uncle Andrew and his wife Jeanne. John didn't know what had happened to the house and land after their deaths.

The state highway was lightly traveled, full of tight curves along the mountains. He didn't let his guard down, but he did feel reassured that he probably hadn't been followed. This type of road would make it difficult to set up a trap without a lot of advanced planning.

A few miles south of Bozeman, the landscape started to look familiar. The long car rides as a child flashed into his mind: seeing the high prairie instead of mountains meant that they were almost there. The next mountains he came to would be his destination. John gazed at the scenery as the road straightened out leading into town.

Stopping in Bozeman, John bought supplies at one of the pharmacies, taking care to pick a store that was locally owned instead of part of a chain. The bathroom was clean enough; he went ahead and washed the long gash on his arm and bandaged it, covering it again with an unbuttoned long-sleeved shirt over his tee so no one would ask too many questions.

The pharmacy sold groceries as well. Not knowing how long he would be staying in one place, John stocked up on some basic supplies and a cooler that he filled with ice.

Heading east of town, the highway was soon bordered by mountains on both sides again. John went east for a few miles, then turned north on a nearly invisible mountain road. This was one of several trails winding into a narrow valley of the Bridger Mountains.

Sebastian's car wasn't built for this kind of rough terrain; John had to pay close attention and weave around potholes and high spots in the gravel and dirt road.

He could still remember what he felt the first time he had seen this road. Uncle Andrew had been at the wheel of his pickup truck, telling John that they were close to his home. John had been too scared to tell his uncle that he needed to pee; the bumps in the road made it worse, but they were almost there. It was just getting dark; the trees loomed over them, and it was both spooky and fascinating.

Later it became routine. They traveled this narrow road to run errands in Bozeman, to visit other people living along this trail, to take care of the land Andrew and Jeanne owned.

He'd had three summers with them. The first was when he was just seven, after his parents' divorce had been finalized. Dad hadn't been around for years by then, but with a custody agreement in place putting John officially in his care, his father's uncle had agreed to watch him instead. That happened twice more, when John was ten and eleven. Jeanne had died in the spring before the summer John was eleven; Uncle Andrew died later that fall.

Andrew's death didn't lead to more time with John's father; instead Mom decided he was old enough to take care of himself while she was working. It was what he'd done before the custody agreement anyway, waiting in the back rooms of the various restaurants and stores where she'd worked.

For a few minutes John worried that he'd taken the wrong northbound trail; the familiarity he'd felt earlier dissipated. Then he saw the Jensens' house, still tidy with a front garden full of flowers. Last time John had been here, they were a newlywed couple taking over her parents' place. If they'd had children, by now those children would be grown. Maybe one of them was living there now.

After that the trees edged farther back from the road for a stretch and then he saw the branch in the road. Turning east, he had to pay even closer attention; the road was rutted and overgrown. When had someone last come out here?

A few more curves and a lot more trees and John was finally there. The small clearing north of the road that had served as a sort of front yard was full of grasses and a few saplings. The cabin was abandoned. For how long, he couldn't tell; less than the thirty or so years since he'd last been here, otherwise the trees would be taller.

John parked the car and walked around. Uncle Andrew and Aunt Jeanne's old home still stood straight; they had built it well. But one window was broken, the paint sections were peeling and the roof was missing a couple of shingles. If no one replaced them, eventually enough of the building would rot away, to lead to its eventual collapse.

He wasn't quite ready to go inside yet, so he picked a few things out of the cooler and ate while sitting on a large rock. Staring at the insects crawling and flying around, he thought about what to do right now. His arm itched under the bandages, but he left it alone. His beard prickled as well—a reminder that he could shave it now, if he wanted.

Finally he stood up and picked the lock to the door, listening to the hinges whine as he pushed it open. The inside smelled of dust and mice droppings, but it was fairly clean; no large pieces of trash, very few items scattered around. The place didn't have any furniture. Someone had cleared it out ages ago. He walked through, checking the floorboards before putting his full weight on them. It was solid.

The bedroom that had been his when he'd stayed there was bare: no toys scattered, no brightly-colored paint on the walls anymore. Aunt Jeanne had let him pick the colors for what was normally their guest room, a gesture that he appreciated now for its generosity. They'd never had children of their own, Uncle Andrew and Aunt Jeanne. Jeanne's unfamiliarity with children had been obvious, but she'd managed to win John's love anyway. She'd been brusque but not mean. She was the first adult woman that John had truly felt comfortable with. That he had loved without reservation or fear.

Walking through their bedroom, memories of his great-uncle and aunt came back to him. Always together, until that last summer. He'd only known them when they were older, of course. Jeanne had faded red hair, but her eyes were still a piercing green. Uncle Andrew wore plaid shirts with the sleeves pushed up, his hair a mixture of white and black that John had started seeing in the mirror a few years ago.

For years he'd wondered why they'd accepted the care of a boy who had such a distant connection to them. Whatever the reason, he was grateful.

After finishing the tour of the small house, he walked out to the car again, put on a baseball cap and shades, and drove back down to the highway. He didn't ask around to find out who owned the land now. Instead he drove two hours east to Billings, a city big enough for multiple home improvement stores and an indifferent population. John paid for a night's stay in a hotel there, and the next morning he bought supplies, enough to do basic repairs on the cabin and to sleep in the rough there.

The next two days were spent working in the September sun: replacing the most damaged shingles, reinforcing weak spots, scraping at mold, clearing away the trash inside. Daylight hours were still warm enough, but it cooled down each night. The sleeping bag he'd bought didn't keep out all of the cool air; he put on all of his clothes and slept anyway, thanks to the tiring physical labor.

John wasn't sure why he felt the compulsion to do it, but he figured it was something only he cared enough to do. A way to honor his uncle and aunt for what they'd done for him.

He'd left his car parked behind some trees. No other vehicles drove past. One time an older man walked by; John made sure to stay out of view and avoid any noisy repairs for a while. The land was beautiful, but empty.

He loved it, but it wasn't home, not anymore. The people here had been why he came back; even their ghosts were long gone by now. Jeanne had died of cancer the spring following John's second summer here. That third summer Uncle Andrew alternated between acting like his usual self and drifting around the house like he'd misplaced something.

John had begged to stay with him at the end of the summer: in part because he didn't want to go back home to his mother, but also because he worried for his uncle. He had been too young to understand, but some part of him knew that something wasn't right.

It happened three months after John had left their place for the last time. The ME had ruled it a hunting accident; he was one of Andrew's old friends. Everyone knew what the truth was. Even John had figured it out.

After doing everything he could to make the house secure for a few more years, John hiked down to the creek that ran through the property. He washed away as much of the grime as he could, gasping at the cold water. Hiking back to the car warmed him up again; he put on the only pair of somewhat clean trousers he had left, and pulled on a plain tee shirt, leaving the bandage until he could get to a bathroom to change it.

* * *

Driving east again; the terrain had a certain variety to it that helped him stay awake.

The clarity of that moment in the barn, when he'd been surrounded by men with weapons, faded as pragmatic concerns took over: where to stop for food, when to take a break and find a hotel. Without anything important to focus on, he felt haunted by his own thoughts.

The abyss pulled at him again. He wanted to see Carter and plead with her to love him; he didn't want to see anyone. He wanted to find a job, to help people; he craved the oblivion of burying himself in a bottle.

He'd been deeper in that abyss before, pulled back into life by an acerbic, paranoid billionaire who listened in all the time and kept him busy enough that he hadn't been able to throw himself back in. It had been a greater gift than John could ever repay. He wasn't going to throw that away now.

He needed a new purpose.

* * *

Forests and mountains shifted to hills and finally flat prairie land, stretching for hundreds of miles ahead. In South Dakota he took his first real break since leaving the cabin. After buying new clothes and a razor, he took a room at an anonymous motel. He used up nearly all of the hot water for a long shower and then shaved off the beard.

After collapsing onto the clean sheets, he turned on the cell phone that he'd last used to send a text to Joss. She'd sent a few replies, ending with a terse note asking him to contact her.

Finch hadn't sent anything new.

John stared at the ceiling, uncertain of what he should say or do now. He felt a strange kinship to Harold's plaintive, _Sometimes human interaction is difficult_. What could John say to Joss right now?

He'd been so accustomed to following orders. Without them, he felt adrift, but something inside him wanted to figure it out for himself. Look for something—a _cause_—on his own rather than holding onto people as replacements for ideals.

Not only that, though. He still feared that any connection Joss felt had been temporary, a result of their time together in a stressful situation.

In spite of the swirl of thoughts running through his mind, he fell asleep, never changing his position from when he'd first laid down on the bed.

* * *

It took him days to make the drive. Post-mission lethargy had set in without a new mission to pick up his mood. Over two thousand miles, three different cars and four pseudonyms used.

He made mental lists as he drove: reasons to see Joss right away versus reasons to stay away. Reasons to find a different destination. Potential jobs he could do. Resources he would need for those potential jobs. Information he could safely pass on anonymously to the FBI about past CIA operations in the US.

And then he was back in the city, skyscrapers and cars everywhere, people walking past with their own lives and concerns unaffected by his.

They were unaffected by the Machine now, too, he thought as he glimpsed security cameras. Just the normal surveillance, whether intrusive or desired.

Harold's Machine was gone; most people hadn't known it existed.

John went to find Harold first. The man hadn't answered the text John had sent the day before, nor replied to the phone message. Finally he drove to their headquarters, taking the usual precautions before going inside.

Instead of a room filled with a black market's worth of computer supplies, John stood in front of an abandoned space. The room had that uninhabited smell. No one had been here for a few days.

John walked around to double-check but he couldn't find anything to indicate what had been here before. No books marked with the Dewey decimal system, no photos of potential victims or perpetrators, no cables snaking across the floor, nothing.

After walking back outside, he stood at the corner, letting the light breeze wash over him. Mid-September; the sweltering city he had left in late July had turned to early fall in his absence. People walked quickly past him, most of them still in short sleeves, appreciating the sunshine while they could.

Whatever any of them was planning was opaque to him now.

A few fallen leaves swirled behind the pedestrians, making circular patterns on the sidewalk before dropping to the ground again, waiting for the next passerby to carry them to another unplanned destination.

* * *

"First you and Carter disappeared for weeks, then your brainy pal went away. At least he had the decency to say goodbye."

John didn't want to interrupt the flow of the detective's bluster. It was already more information than John's two days of looking had given him, but the man looked at John expectantly, waiting for a reply. "I was a bit preoccupied at the time, Lionel."

"Yeah, I get that. And thanks for helping her. But then what, you broke all your fingers or something? Couldn't find your phone to make a call?"

John raised his eyebrows, wondering what had brought on the extra layer of angry attitude. Fusco finally gave in, saying, "Look, Carter was worried about you, I could tell. And your pal was only talking to me, not her, so I don't know what was going on with that. And now he's gone, and you're back, and I got no idea what happened 'cause Carter and your pal were neither one of them talking about it."

"Finch wasn't in contact with her after she came back?"

"I know there were some anonymous tips that came from him, but when he called me, he told me not to tell her. He just kept checking on her. And something was off. With your friend, I mean. Carter, too. So what'd you do, piss 'em both off?"

John didn't answer the question. "When did you last hear from him?"

Fusco glared at him from the side as they walked down the sidewalk, aggressively taking a bite of the hot dog John had bought for him before answering. " 'Bout a week ago. Anonymous tip on Wednesday, and another spooky phone call on Friday."

"Spooky?"

"Every time he called, he'd tell me things about our cases that even we didn't know. And then he'd always ask how Carter was doing and tell me 'Please keep her safe, detective' with that professor voice." Fusco's voice shifted into something resembling Finch's sharper tones for the line about keeping Carter safe.

Continuing, he said, "Same thing every time. Like I don't watch her back already, especially after whatever happened before."

Pausing to wipe his fingers on the napkin, Lionel added, "Hey, did you know she almost got demoted after that disappearance stunt? I think your pal must've pulled some strings with the captain to keep her around, because he was pissed."

"Why would she have been demoted?" John could guess at the reasons, but he was curious to hear for himself.

"Not waiting for the paperwork to clear before leaving for the 'family emergency'," Fusco answered. "But there was bad blood between those two before I ever showed up. Not to mention that he's a sorry bastard who hates being wrong."

John nodded at Fusco's description of his captain. Time to follow up now on one of the first things Fusco had told him. "You mentioned that Finch said good-bye."

"Right. So last Friday after he did the usual thing, he said he probably wouldn't be in contact again. And then he got even weirder than usual and said he was sorry, but he didn't say what for."

When John didn't add anything to the conversation, Fusco asked, "So do I ever get to hear what was going on while you two were gone? Other than it was something bad?"

John's lips twitched. "Probably not," he admitted. "Listen, I may not be in contact as much as before. But, uh, thanks. For everything." Dragging Lionel Fusco into this odd crusade had been a matter of cool practicality at the time, but the man had proven himself to be a better ally than John could have asked for. Maybe even a better ally than what John deserved.

Fusco nodded in acknowledgement.

"Keep an eye on your partner for me," said John, unable to resist throwing the command at the man one more time.

Fusco rolled his eyes at yet another repeat of the same admonishment and said, "Like that's a hardship." After stopping the theatrics, he added, "Nah, she's good. Tough."

Turning to leave, John looked back and said, "Oh, and Fusco? Don't tell Carter you saw me."

The man spluttered. "Like living in a damn spy movie," he said. Right before John was out of earshot, Fusco muttered, "Or kindergarten."

* * *

Three days of searching for Finch, and the man had left on his own. If he was honest with himself, John had already known it. He didn't know all of the reasons why, but part of it would be connected to Harold's Machine. Alicia Corwin had found Finch. Root had found him as well, eliminating Corwin as she worked to get close enough to grab Harold. Finch himself had told Henry Peck about building the Machine.

Unscrupulous people would want the Machine to be rebuilt, and even with all of his money and intelligence, Harold hadn't managed to disappear completely two years ago.

Another potential piece of the mystery would be the guilt Harold felt over what the Machine had done. What Fusco had told John confirmed that: no actual contact with Joss, just watching out for her like John had requested.

John wondered what Joss thought of Harold right now. If her anger had dissipated yet.

He watched Joss and Taylor the next morning, leaving their home to go to work and school. Taylor grinned at his mother as he crammed peanut butter on toast into his mouth, teasing her about something. Carter looked good, her round face animated with frowns and then smiles as she talked to her son. The top of her hair was pulled back, but the lower parts were still too short for a ponytail.

Family... John thought of one connection that he hadn't yet checked while looking for Finch.

* * *

"Was there another disturbance report, Officer... I'm sorry, I don't remember your name."

"It's fine," John said. "I'm actually here to ask you about something else." Grace had offered him tea; he'd refused. He'd waited until they were both seated in her living room to bring up the real topic.

It was a wise choice. As soon as he mentioned Harold's name, her soft demeanor changed. "You're not a policeman. You..." She struggled with words for a moment and then said, "Did he send you, then? He's wasting his time. I said everything I needed to say when he showed up here _two years too late_."

"He didn't send me. I came on my own. He's a friend—"

"Friend?" Her voice pitched upward. "He doesn't have those. He collects people and assigns them to roles, but it's not real." Agitated, she stood and walked around the room. He'd noticed earlier that some items appeared to be missing: the glass-fronted built-in cabinet was open, with empty spaces between some of the books. The normal accumulation of dust was dotted with clear spots here and there. John spotted a cardboard box on the floor, items haphazardly piled inside.

The light green frame that held the photograph of Grace and Harold together was on top of the pile.

She walked over to the window and stared out, her arms crossed and hands gripping her biceps.

"It was real," John told her. "He didn't want to give you up, but he couldn't let you get hurt."

Pivoting, she said, "And he gets to make that decision for me? We were engaged. We were supposed to decide together and he just... makes that choice for me." Her blue eyes reminded John of Harold's for a moment: the intensity, the strong emotion radiating from her.

"He thought it was for the best."

"Bullshit. Like he's some self-sacrificing nobleman watching over the rest of us, treating me like I can't handle something. Bad enough that he decided for me. But then he didn't even tell me, and that's why I just can't..."

Forgive him. Those were the words she would have said next.

Her anger wouldn't let her stay quiet. "I knew that he was working on something secret. I knew there were things he couldn't tell me. But I didn't think that he would lie to me. Not to me."

More steps around the room; the stillness and quiet grief of the woman he'd met before were transformed into passionate outrage. "I saw him. Outside the apartment once, over by the magazine office... I thought I was losing my mind, that I was holding onto our past, but no. It was him. He got to see me, but I didn't get to see him."

She took a series of deep breaths, pursing her lips tightly for a moment; the emotional storm was on hold, however precarious that hold was. Looking at him, Grace let one corner of her mouth slide upward, a mockery of the sweet smile from before. "I never asked to be put on a pedestal."

"He wanted to keep you safe," John said.

"_He _wanted. That's exactly the problem. He never asked me what I wanted." Grace's hands moved as she spoke, briefly illustrating her words with gestures. "I think you need to go. I don't want..." Her voice trailed off again. "I don't want to be reminded of him right now, and you're a reminder."

He stood up. John had no intention of going against her wishes, but he still wanted to see Finch again. "If you'd like, I can give him a message for you. He left you a number, didn't he?"

She stared at him briefly, a variety of emotions crossing her face. "It's in a book he brought me. Charles Dickens. There's a number, but I put the book in the trash."

"I could go get it." She hadn't carried out the trash yet, he could tell. The box was still in the living room; the book had to be inside the house as well.

Grace gripped her arms again. "No," she said, shaking her head as she spoke. "No." Head down, she stared at the floor in front of her.

John walked to the doorway, turning and looking at her again. Her eyes were now focused on the photo frame inside the box. He wasn't sure what he could say, if anything. Finally he told her, "Men do stupid things when they're in love. Noble and stupid." It was the only explanation he could give: for himself, for Harold.

She didn't look at him, but she nodded once.

* * *

Harold had wanted to keep Grace safe. John wanted to keep Joss safe.

John had always been the one doing the leaving. He hadn't realized what the unintended consequences might be, hadn't considered her perceptions.

He had to see her. Even if she was angry with him, it wasn't fair to let her believe that he didn't care enough to come back.

John couldn't do it yet, though. Instead he started piecing together an identity to use, something he could use that wouldn't connect to any of his previous work. He needed a place to stay.

When he'd first gotten back to the city, he had taken a few items from the fancy apartment Finch had bought him, but he hadn't taken the risk of staying there. Having chosen to stay, he found an apartment to buy with a previously unused cover ID. It was bigger than his usual closet-sized bolt holes, but far smaller than the gift apartment from Finch: two moderately-sized bedrooms, enough space for a few guests in the living room, a kitchen big enough to let him cook if he chose. Not too big, though. Like a lot of homes in the city, it was compact.

After making a couple of safe spots and hiding parts of various stashes in them, he went looking for a library. For a moment he thought about going to the main library, with its large, graceful lines and the lion statues outside. Instead he walked to the library closest to his apartment.

Ironic that the biggest pieces of the puzzle fell into place while he was there. Finding a job at a library: Finch would approve. It started simply enough with a family of newly arrived Hungarian immigrants and a librarian who couldn't communicate with them. John volunteered to help with translating, to everyone's relief, and that seemed to be the end of it.

Except that after he finished his part, he overheard the Molnar family discussing a problem they were having with documentation. With their agreement, he did a little digging and found out that the man harassing them about papers and money was preying on other immigrants as well, demanding money for documents that they didn't actually need.

John broke the man's nose—a thoroughly satisfactory moment—and called in an anonymous tip. Friends of the Molnars called him the next day, asking for help with a different problem, and then two days later he had a call from someone connected to the second family.

Finally he had a call from someone who seemed completely unconnected to all of the previous callers. John's phone number had gotten passed around outside the small circle.

That was the turning point. He'd been looking for something to do and instead it found him. Time to jump; he found a print shop and ordered business cards printed with his phone number.

Initially he wore suits out of habit. Finally he decided that since he was neither a Company man nor Finch's soldier, he could choose something different: jeans or durable trousers in black, combat boots and a dark button-front shirt. If the weather was cool enough, he put on his black leather jacket.

He kept the suits in his closet, anticipating that he would need them again at some point. For now it was easier not to wear them; the people who contacted him those first few days didn't need someone to bluff his way into high-end offices. They needed help, and most of them couldn't afford or couldn't wait for the legal version.

The suits reminded him of Finch. It was more than a sting that the man had left no way to contact him.

They made him think of Joss as well; her ironic tone at the café when she complimented him on his suit, the few times he'd caught her well-hidden admiring glances. Everything reminded him of her, though. He watched her at work once, smiling at the way Lionel and Joss sparred verbally. John wanted a friendship like that. He wanted more, too, but he didn't deserve it.

Grace's words still haunted him; John knew that he had to speak to her. But two and a half weeks since his return to the city he still didn't know what to say to her.

It was a Saturday morning; Friday night he'd helped a college student who'd gotten into debt with the wrong people. John's knuckles were grazed, but the other guy looked a lot worse.

Time to talk to her. He made his way to Randall's Island, hoping that Carter wouldn't be called away by work. Clouds drifted overhead, making a splotchy pattern of gray and blue overhead. The shifting light created a patchwork of colors on the soccer fields. John spotted Taylor first. He was warming up with other boys his age, kicking around a soccer ball and goofing off. It took him a few minutes to find Joss after that. She was sitting near the corner of a low set of bleachers; in front of her a girls' team was finishing up a game. John watched her as her forehead wrinkled in concentration, reading the papers in her lap. Files from work, he guessed, since her son wasn't playing yet.

The light breeze caught her loose hair, swirling it around her face. She set the papers down on the bleacher, sliding the edge underneath her to keep the file from blowing open. Then she fished a clip from the depths of her purse, pinning some of her hair back.

Her brown eyes took in everything: the field in front of her, the other spectators on the low bleachers, the periphery. She pulled the papers out again and scribbled a note on the top page.

He still didn't know what to say to her. Promise her that he would be there... tell her that he would stay away... admit how much he'd missed her.

Everything was as it was supposed to be for her, thought John. She was doing her job and watching out for her son. Joss didn't need him.

John was about to turn to leave when she caught sight of him. Her mouth opened in a perfect O shape. She looked up and down quickly: either an injury check or simply distracted by the different outfit. Looking at his eyes again, her face was a kaleidoscope of emotions, shifting quickly enough that he couldn't register all of them.

Then she gave him a look that said _get over here_, so he did.

She seemed at a loss for words, opening her mouth once to speak while she looked up at him. He was standing next to her, wondering what she was going to say. Finally she asked, "How long have you been back in town?"

"A few days," he answered. Closer to three weeks, but he wasn't going to clarify that right now.

"I haven't heard any reports of kneecapping lately."

He let his mouth turn up at the corner. "New job," he said. "Less kneecapping and more nose-breaking."

She let out a small huff of laughter. "Really. I have to say, I'm surprised to hear it."

"Different management," he told her. He wanted to explain all of it to her, but the work was still so new. There were other things he wanted to say as well. Instead he stood next to her and resisted the urge to wrap her in his arms, bury his face in the crook of her neck and inhale her scent.

Her eyes scrutinized his face; he didn't know what she saw, what she wanted to know. Finally she said, "I was worried that you'd gotten arrested."

A litmus test statement. "I'm sorry," he said. Her eyes widened at that.

"Are you going to disappear again? Or are you going to stay?" The question wasn't about where he would live and work. It was about them.

_I want to stay,_ he thought. _But I can't. _He didn't say anything out loud.

"I think you should stay. Just..." She didn't finish that thought; instead she reached out with her hand and took his pinky between her thumb and index finger, pulling slightly.

Her simple words and the small tug: the gentlest pressure, leaving him to decide what to do. Her fingertips were warm against his skin. He closed his eyes briefly, afraid that when he opened them again, this would all disappear.

Of all the things he'd imagined happening when they finally spoke again, he hadn't allowed himself to think that she might offer him a second chance, unprompted.

"Try for a little while," she whispered, and he could hear the uncertainty and fear in her voice. How much of that was about him and how much for herself, John didn't know.

All of this had been leading him back to her, he thought. Staying in New York, choosing an apartment, finding a purpose—he had needed those pieces to fall into place, and she was waiting there for him.

He took a deep breath, opened his eyes and sat next to her.

He couldn't focus right away, blinking quickly at the rush of emotion he felt. Looking down, he took her hand, entwining their fingers. Ostensibly they watched the teenage girls playing soccer. John barely noticed the game in front of them and the cool breeze from the water surrounding Randall's Island; he let himself feel the warmth of her hand in his.

After a minute she said, "I'll save yelling at you for later." If her voice was a bit wobbly, he wasn't going to call her on it.

He was torn between telling her that he didn't deserve this chance and begging her to never let him stay away that long again.

Instead he said, "I look forward to it," and smoothed his thumb across her palm.

* * *

_Epilogue still to come._


	11. Epilogue

Finished! Thanks to everyone who commented on various chapters; you definitely helped motivate me to keep going. A big thanks again to SabaceanBabe for beta-reading, and to her and Lizardbeth J for letting me bounce ideas off of them.

(Non-Americans: for a high school graduation ceremony the students wear a mortarboard and robe, often referred to as a cap and gown. Generally each high school has a color for both that all students have to wear; black is the most common choice. I have no idea if other countries have similar traditions or not.)

* * *

**June 2015**  
The people one level below him milled in small clusters, relatives and friends surrounding the young men and women wearing caps and gowns. It took John a few minutes to spot the group he was looking for; he still wasn't used to seeing Taylor without his loose afro. Instead Taylor's hair was clipped close to his scalp under the traditional mortarboard.

No one in the group had spotted John yet as he looked down from the open stairwell. Joss and Taylor knew he would be there; that was what mattered most.

Joss was laughing at a remark from a man that John assumed was one of the cousins from Virginia. After finishing the conversation, she turned back to look at her son again, tall and slim in his robe.

Not so slim as before. It was about four years ago that he saw Taylor for the first time; the boy's shoulders had widened since then. His chest had filled in, thanks both to time and to Taylor's enjoyment of soccer and basketball. (He didn't have the height or speed to win athletic scholarships, but that hadn't been his goal anyway.)

Not quite three years since Joss had invited John into her life. Hard to believe that much time had already passed.

She still wanted him there, too. When he worked in the Army and in the Agency, he hadn't let himself believe in luck. Nothing could be left to chance: that had been his opinion. Now he was certain that he was damn lucky to have this life and these people in it.

At times he hadn't been sure that they would make it this far. He and Joss constantly renegotiated what they shared: time, spaces, people. She still had a gun-shy attitude now and then, something John understood well. Losing Taylor's father, keeping Taylor safe now, all of the other emotional bruises left by life. Add in his tendency to doubt that he deserved anything good in life; he was pleasantly surprised that their relationship hadn't imploded under the weight.

Surprised and grateful. Grateful for her continued support, grateful that she forgave him when he made colossal errors.

John leaned against the railing to keep the group in sight. He could tell the moment Joss spotted him; she didn't show an obvious reaction, but he could see a tiny smile appear as she glanced away from him again.

Taylor was smiling for more pictures with the Maryland cousins. It had taken some time for John to see that side of his character. Their first interactions happened without Joss knowing, in fact. Taylor sent him a text message saying, _Anger and intolerance are the enemies of correct understanding._

How he managed to get John's number, John didn't know. Nor did he know at the time why Taylor would send him a quote from Mahatma Ghandi. The text messages continued for weeks, with quotes from Martin Luther King, Jr. Bayard Rustin, the Dalai Lama, Golda Meir, Indira Ghandi, even Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Eventually John started answering some of the texts. The slow but steady stream of quotes by famous pacifists amused him, and the simple messages didn't come with a time limit; he could wait and give a thoughtful reply.

The texts from Taylor came first. Later Joss started arranging activities for all three of them: a sortie to a secluded restaurant, dinner at her place, watching basketball at his apartment. None of those activities were held on a regular basis; Joss was still wary of the people who were on the lookout for him, and rightly so. While the FBI didn't have his case on active status, it had never been closed. The CIA had a presence in the city from time to time as well, still operating illegally within the US.

Taylor's safety was still the biggest factor. It was one reason why Taylor's graduation felt like a milestone to John as well.

Taylor's texts expanded to other topics after John and Taylor became better acquainted. Once he asked John to find out what case was upsetting Joss. Another time he sent the message that he'd gotten a four out of five on two of his AP exams, and that John should come over for celebratory Pad Thai. And John's favorite: _At Marco's this weekend, please check on Mom_. Not because it meant more time with Joss—although that was certainly a fantastic benefit—but because of Taylor's display of trust.

In the crowd below, John saw Fusco and Lee catching up to the group around Taylor. After congratulating the young man, Lionel started looking around for John. He wasn't as good at subtle as Joss, so John amused himself by backing up slightly, making it more difficult for someone to see him.

Lionel had given John a lot of help when he'd first gotten back: helping him find a few more people who were willing to help others, and who didn't mind some slightly shady work.

With Fusco present, three of the four people from the original team were here. John wished that Harold had joined them as well. The man had already sent his best wishes in his own inimitable way: a scholarship for Taylor, one that was newly created, for "children of NYPD officers". Doubtless this meant that Lee Fusco would be a potential recipient in a few years as well.

Joss hadn't figured it out right away. She'd been excitedly talking to John about it when they were curled around each other on his couch, telling him that Taylor didn't even remember applying for it... and then she'd blurted out a surprised _Oh!_

"G. H. Faulkner. Faulkner—falconer. Son of a bitch," she'd said, and shook her head, thwacking his chest and laughing from the surprise.

That was one of their traditions now. When they watched TV at his place—Joss was a more rabid fan of college sports than he'd expected—she would pretend to get irritated about something, backhand his chest and then insist on removing his shirt to inspect any potential injuries. Neither one of them had had much time for that sort of thing in their past relationships. He found now that he didn't give a damn about being too old for that kind of silliness.

It was ridiculous, but it was theirs.

After the routine inspection, Joss had snuggled into him and said, "I hope he's okay." It was the first time she'd expressed something like that. Not that she had wished Harold any harm or complained about him since John's return, but this was another step.

"He is," John had told her.

The first big hint he'd had that Harold was okay was when he noticed one of his bank accounts had doubled in size: a huge blessing, considering how much money he could burn through while working to help fix people's problems.

Later he'd had a few visits with Harold, and then a memorable visit from Grace.

Forgiveness ran deep in the women in their lives, John concluded. He was still amazed that Joss stayed with him, and grateful that Grace had eventually chosen to reach out to Harold.

Everyone smiled as Fusco took photos of Joss with Taylor. Then Joss took out her camera and took photos of her son with some of his friends. Her smile glowed as she looked at her son, pride radiating from her.

Her hair was pinned up in a complicated arrangement, something he rarely saw. She was beautiful regardless, but he liked her hair pinned up when he could undo the pins later.

Instead he would see her tomorrow. Taylor's paternal grandmother was staying with them, and Joss was bringing her to meet John tomorrow. He planned to cook lunch for them—at a secondary apartment rather than his preferred place.

Leaning over the railing again, John could see and hear Joss's mother ordering everyone around for a few last photos. They'd already met a few times. She didn't know much about John; just enough to be very curious, a trait shared with her daughter. In other ways mother and daughter were dramatically different.

Her mother's attitude spoke of a more relaxed nature; John wondered if Joss would mellow into something like that or if she would keep her drive.

Either way, he was looking forward to finding out.


End file.
